A decade after water crisis, progress for Lake Erie remains sluggish

Ten years ago this Friday, Toledo-area residents woke up to an algae-driven water crisis that brought unwanted attention from other parts of the world and inflicted a scar on the city’s reputation.

Panic set in during the wee hours of the morning of Aug. 2, 2014, when the city, under orders from the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency, posted on Facebook at 2 a.m. that an algal poison from Lake Erie, called microcystin, had made Toledo’s tap water unsafe to drink and even unsafe to touch until further notice.

Though the order lasted fewer than three days, it felt like an eternity to many people and underscored how much humans rely on safe water during their everyday lives.

“It was kind of a chaotic mess,” Andy McClure, Toledo’s Collins Park Water Treatment Plant commissioner of plant operations, recalled.

In addition to affected homes and businesses, life was anything but normal inside hospitals, nursing homes, and other health-care facilities.

Rising toxin levels in tap water produced by the treatment plant had made the state environmental regulator uncomfortable during the hours leading up to the event.

Both the Ohio EPA and the city of Toledo had learned a couple of days earlier that there was an unusual toxic algal bloom making its way down from Monroe and toward Toledo’s water intake crib. When it got here, a classic nor’easter — strong, sustained winds from the northeast — pushed the usually buoyant algae deep underwater, where it got sucked in via the intake.

On that early Aug. 2, which was a Saturday that year, the city was notified that it had to start preparing the first-ever of its kind do-not-drink-or-touch order. The water-treatment plant, capable even back then of removing small amounts of toxin, suddenly became overwhelmed by the deluge.

Ed Moore, retired Toledo Department of Public Utilities director, recalls getting the late-night call at his house from then-Ohio EPA Director Craig Butler and the agency’s water division chief at the time, Mike Baker.

“From that point on, we went into emergency action mode,” Mr. Moore said.

By 3 a.m., just an hour after the city had put the word out on Facebook, nearly all cases of bottled water had been purchased from big box stores and all-night supermarkets. Many back then, before the coronavirus pandemic, were open 24 hours a day.

Then, a little after daybreak that Saturday, the majority of Toledo-area residents were waking up, running out to their automobiles, and driving three to four hours into Michigan, Indiana, southern Ohio, or wherever they heard about stores that still had some bottled water in stock.

Confusion reigned.

Many unknowns

The Toledo-Lucas County health commissioner at the time, Dr. David Grossman, went on the airwaves to urge people against brushing their teeth that morning, then reversed himself hours later. Shortly after that, he admitted to a reporter in a parking lot he wasn’t quite sure which piece of advice was best.

Toledo was in uncharted territory. There was even confusion over how water samples were supposed to be preserved, packaged, and sent to laboratories for analysis. The Ohio EPA and the city quarreled over whether water samples needed to have algal cells cracked open in the plant laboratory before they were sent out, a process known as lysing.

Early samples were sent out without being quenched for chlorine. They were driven by Ohio State Highway Patrol troopers to helicopters being used to shuttle them to faraway laboratories, such as the U.S. EPA’s national water lab in Cincinnati and a highly respected lab at Lake Superior State University in Michigan.

But split samples yielded a mishmash of results because of the chlorine residuals in tap water. The longer chlorine made contact, the more it degraded samples.

“It was a big learning curve for a lot of people,” according to Heather Raymond, an Ohio State University researcher who was the Ohio EPA’s harmful algal bloom coordinator at the time and spent much of that weekend analyzing samples sent to the federal agency’s Cincinnati lab.

Brenda Snyder, who was the Collins Park Water Treatment Plant chief chemist at the time, said state and federal packaging guidelines were written for raw water samples, not tap water samples. So it took a while before experts realized the chlorine residuals had to be quenched, or stopped from being active.

“We were getting a lot of requests from the Ohio EPA, some of which didn't make sense,” Ms. Snyder said.

Besides the confusion over process and packaging, there was no firm U.S. EPA standard for microcystins in drinking water.

There still isn’t, technically. What Congress approved the following year was a first-ever U.S. health advisory, which is simply a recommendation. The algal toxin in question was one of more than 100 microscopic water particles under federal review.

In 2014, the state of Ohio was relying on a 1998 World Health Organization recommendation for less-developed countries.

It chose to act, as it was legally allowed to do, when it saw a threshold surpassed for what some have since claimed was meant to be for longer-term exposures.

“Given the unknowns, we didn't want someone to report to the hospital and say ‘My infant is not breathing,’” Ms. Raymond said in support of the Ohio EPA’s decision to act.

She also said it didn’t want to have people die of an algal toxin while undergoing a dialysis treatment, either. Fresh in everyone’s mind was a high-profile event in Brazil during the mid-1990s that resulted in dozens of people succumbing during treatment when the same algal toxin got into the water of a dialysis center there.

Customers of the Toledo water system were told to skip their showers until conditions improved.

They were told not to boil water, especially to make infant formula. Boiling water would only concentrate the toxin, they learned.

Countless volunteers immediately mobilized to help get clean water to homeless or low-income residents.

Then-Gov. John Kasich called upon the Ohio National Guard to supplement those efforts by distributing clean water to whomever needed it.

Restaurants, taverns, and any other businesses that served water were ordered to shut down. Many that balked were fined by the health department.

Car washes weren’t allowed to operate. Convenience stores were forbidden from selling fountain drinks. Drive-throughs were closed.

As for cooling off in a public swimming pool during one of summer 2014’s hottest weekends? Forget about it.

“It was a ghost town for a while. The whole place was deserted,” Mr. Moore recalled. “All of the shelves were empty. People were really, really stressed about water.”

Unwanted attention

Mr. Moore and others agree that Toledo’s reputation took a hit during a time in which social media was popular, though less developed than it is now.

Online articles drew viewers from across the world. Former Ohio Sen. Randy Gardner (R., Ohio) later talked during a state legislative hearing about a friend in Africa who told him about newspaper articles being published over there.

“This was an international story,” Mr. Moore said. “I was not shocked at all by the politics of it.”

Toledo became a poster child for water pollution caused by rising incidences of toxic cyanobacteria, commonly known as harmful algal blooms. It’s a symptom of climate change and poor land use globally.

For a while, the city got top mention in several speeches around the country given by then-U.S. EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy.

Then-Mayor D. Michael Collins served as the point person throughout the crisis, refusing to declare an end to it until the entire city had clean water again.

To help make the announcement on the morning of Aug. 4, 2014, he called a news conference so that he could drink a glass of Toledo water in front of television cameras and still photographers.

Mr. Collins, a former city councilman and longtime Toledo police officer, had only been mayor for seven months. Mr. Moore was new to the public utilities department himself, having been transferred there only four months earlier as part of a reorganization.

Mayor Collins, who died in office of a heart attack within months, called the Toledo water crisis a “crisis of confidence” in local government, because it had failed on its fundamental mission to provide clean water.

“The community lost confidence in us, and they should have,” he told The Blade back then. “Right from the start, people lost confidence in us, and I don’t blame them.”

Follow-up surveys by the health department showed many people opted to keep using bottled water weeks after the water was deemed safe to drink again. Similar hesitation had occurred after the 1993 cryptosporidium outbreak in Milwaukee. That parasite killed 69 people and sickened 400,000 others when it got into tap water there.

History of troubles

Many people have attributed the Toledo water crisis to problems that began years earlier and during past administrations, when city councilmen balked at funding major upgrades the Ohio EPA had wanted to be made at the aging water plant dedicated by former President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

A Blade review of more than 500 pages of records showed a contentious relationship existed between the city and the state for years, despite what public officials had tried to say about cooperation.

Governor Kasich focused on the water plant’s longstanding repair needs when he held a news conference outside Toledo’s emergency operation center during the water crisis.

His former communications director told The Blade there had even been some discussion about a possible state takeover of the plant before the water crisis, a rarely executed move.

“We had a really, really bad relationship with our regulator,” Mr. Moore now admits.

One of the first orders of business after the crisis ended was going to Columbus to mend fences with the state agency, he said.

Growing problem

Algal blooms weren’t anything new to western Lake Erie when the water crisis occurred in 2014.

Different species of blooms had been identified for decades in the 1900s. They disappeared from sight after the federal Clean Water Act of 1972 ushered in the modern era of sewage treatment 52 years ago.

The current era of blooms began in the summer of 1995. A former Ohio State University limnologist, David Culver, was assigned by the U.S.-Canada International Joint Commission to head a 23-member research team in hopes of nipping the problem in the bud.

That obviously didn’t work.

The precursor for Toledo’s water crisis was one that happened 11 months earlier in Ottawa County’s Carroll Township .

Plant superintendent Henry Biggert didn’t hesitate when he saw the township’s water plant being overwhelmed by microcystis one day in September of 2013.

Rather than wait for the bureaucratic process to play out, he immediately took it upon himself to shut it down. He switched its 2,000 customers over to Port Clinton’s water system until the threat subsided.

“He’s a damned hero,” Ms. Snyder, of Toledo’s plant, said.

But Toledo didn’t heed the warning of that first-ever event in Ohio, nor was there a backup option.

Several people have said it was like the city was in denial.

Ms. Snyder said the city had access to a buoy with indicator sensors that could have given operators more time to respond.

But the city council would not pay to deploy it. She and others wanted buoy sensors at the water intake.

“We had a contract in place to get buoys in [before the water crisis],” Mr. McClure, the Collins Park plant commissioner, said. “That's how we got them in the water so quickly [after it].”

Some $500 million was invested in the Collins Park Water Treatment Plant after the water crisis, about $312 million of which was already funded and approved. A blue ribbon task force formed after the crisis insisted on having ozone technology added, which drove the overall improvement costs up another $188 million.

From an operator’s standpoint, the buoys have been as important as anything, Mr. McClure said.

“We did take it seriously,” he said of the Carroll Township event 11 months earlier. “The contract process was just dragging on.”

New tools

The Toledo water crisis has, in fact, inspired the deployment of more buoys throughout each of the Great Lakes.

Buoy calibration has become an annual event at the University of Toledo Lake Erie Center and elsewhere. Eddie Verhamme, a principal at Ann Arbor-based LimnoTech, leads a large effort aimed at expanding buoy surveillance and is pleased more have been added throughout the Great Lakes each summer.

Another one of the major improvements is in outer space.

Digital imagery relayed by the European Union’s Copernicus Sentinel-3 satellites in recent years gives the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration a deep, three-dimensional look at what’s beneath the surface of Lake Erie.

Images from the earlier generation of satellites used in 2014 could only track what’s on the surface and in much lower resolution.

Satellites picked up the presence of a bloom in 2014, but not much about how it was forming below the surface, said Rick Stumpf, an oceanographer and lead bloom tracker for NOAA’s National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science.

He said there was likely “way more bloom present than we thought there was on July 31 and Aug. 1 [2014].”

Nobody knows why the 2014 bloom was so toxic. Its algal cells were putting out three to four times as much toxin as the 2015 bloom, Lake Erie’s largest for biomass on record dating back to 2002.

Researchers also learned later about a virus that dissolved toxin in the raw lake water, making the job of removing it at a water-treatment plant even more difficult.

“They weren't anticipating removing dissolved material,” Mr. Stumpf said.

Clean water is, of course, a precious commodity in many other parts of the world. Suddenly, other parts of the world were asking the same thing: How could a water crisis be happening in a port city along the Great Lakes, which holds 20 percent of Earth’s fresh surface water?

In the big picture, that question continues to be asked today.

Protecting the lake

Five years after the water crisis, a group of activists succeeded in getting legislation known as the Lake Erie Bill of Rights passed by Toledo voters during a special election. Though eventually declared unconstitutional by U.S. District Judge Jack Zouhary, it further underscored much of the community’s frustration over a lack of progress. Supporters said they don’t like being normalized to think western Lake Erie will be fouled by algae each summer.

Using best available science, the Ohio EPA has shown in four “mass balance” reports since the water crisis that the vast majority of western Lake Erie’s algae-forming phosphorus comes from agricultural runoff.

Yet the debate still rages over whether the agricultural industry is doing enough to curb runoff — and if the manure generated by large livestock facilities is being managed wisely enough.

Jeff Reutter, retired Ohio Sea Grant and Ohio State University Stone Laboratory director, represented the state of Ohio during international negotiations in 2015 over phosphorus releases into Lake Erie. That year — not 2014 — was the record-setter for bloom biomass.

Those talks led to an agreement the following February, in early 2016, by the governments of Ontario, Michigan, and Ohio to reduce phosphorus concentrations 40 percent by 2025.

But eight years later, Mr. Reutter notes, the target isn’t close to being met.

It also doesn’t specify a reduction goal for dissolved reactive phosphorus, the type most efficient at helping algae grow.

The source for much of that is livestock manure that gets spread on crop fields as a cost-effective nutrient.

Mr. Reutter is now part of a growing chorus of people who blame concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, for generating so much manure, and are increasingly vocal about proverbial “one-unders,” the growing number of facilities with just a few animals shy of being inspected and regulated like those required to hold CAFO permits.

“Every year, we allow more animals into the watershed,” he said. “At a minimum, let's not allow more animals into the watershed until it's figured out.”

Activist Mike Ferner said the water crisis inspired him to create Lake Erie Advocates, one of the region’s most outspoken critics of large livestock facilities. He also ran for mayor a second time after Mr. Collins died but did not win.

Another well-known activist, Sandy Bihn, said she “had so hoped that the Toledo water crisis would result in concerted action to start getting the 40 percent phosphorus reductions that science says we need to reduce most of the harmful blooms.”

Half of the reduction was to be achieved by 2020.

“We all know that never happened,” Ms. Bihn said.

The modern era of western Lake Erie algal blooms didn’t start with Toledo’s 2014 water crisis, but that event led to countless investments by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Ohio Department of Higher Education’s Harmful Algal Bloom Research Initiative and, more recently, Gov. Mike DeWine’s multimillion statewide water-improvement program called H2Ohio.

The DeWine administration continues to push voluntary incentives through H2Ohio instead of passing stricter regulations on the agricultural industry, a policy that mirrors Mr. Kasich’s approach but has a lot more money, a wider variety of incentives, and larger cash payments to farmers. It also is making an unprecedented investment in wetlands, as well as water infrastructure.

Mr. Reutter likes the concept of H2Ohio but said it appears the state is trying to sell the public on progress by tallying participation statistics. He said it should be focused on dissolved reactive phosphorus, especially the flow-weighted mean of it found in Maumee River samples at Heidelberg University’s Waterville station.

“Are we seeing improvement?” Mr. Reutter asked of Lake Erie water quality. “We're not.”

He and others were disappointed the state EPA made no mention of dissolved reactive phosphorus in the Total Maximum Daily Load program it was required to submit to the U.S. EPA last summer after the Chicago-based Environmental Law & Policy Center and the Board of Lucas County Commissioners fought to get an order for that planning document from Senior U.S. District Court Judge James Carr.

A new lawsuit was filed this year in hopes of getting a stronger TMDL. This time, the city of Toledo is a co-plaintiff.

“In this instance, the law provides sufficient guidance: any effective remedial plan must meet the minimum standards for efficacy and reliability that federal law and the accompanying regulations provide — at least until a majority of the Supreme Court decides to change that too,” said attorney Fritz Byers, who represents Lucas County in the litigation.

The state agency has said it opted for a focus on total phosphorus, much like what was in the 40 percent reduction goal negotiated in 2015.

But Mr. Reutter, who used to advise past governors and other politicians from both parties, said that total phosphorus is a measurement that obscures how much dissolved reactive phosphorus is in the water.

Jordan Hoewischer, Ohio Farm Bureau Federation water quality and research director, did something this week the farm bureau doesn’t often do and that’s agree with its critics that the Ohio EPA blew it.

Mr. Hoewischer told The Blade the science has become evident that dissolved reactive phosphorus should be the focus and agreed with Mr. Reutter that using total phosphorus as the yardstick for a TMDL is wrong.

“I think the focus should be solely on dissolved reactive phosphorus,” Mr. Hoewischer said.

Large livestock facilities are a lot more responsible than people think. He said they have been “demonized,” and he believes the problem isn’t the volume of manure applied to crop fields but a lack of understanding of how it gets broken down into nutrients by microbes.

It’s akin to “grains of sand that end up being a sand dune,” Mr. Hoewischer said.

“Farmers aren't deliberately slinging manure anywhere,” he said. “They try to put it where it's supposed to be.”

Howard Learner, ELPC executive director, said the lack of progress with Lake Erie continues to be “a national embarrassment.”

“I'm defining a win when Lake Erie is cleaned up and there are not algae outbreaks for nine of every 10 summers,” he said.

Mr. Learner called the current TMDL “woefully insufficient” because of its reliance on total phosphorus as the guiding indicator, and said he is pleased the Farm Bureau agrees it should be dissolved reactive phosphorus.

“It's good news the Farm Bureau is recognizing the scientific reality of the problem. The Ohio EPA isn't recognizing that sound science,” he said.

At its final TMDL hearing, in Bowling Green during February of 2023, Ohio EPA officials said only they were sticking to total phosphorus despite pleas for a focus on dissolved reactive phosphorus.

U.S. EPA Regional Administrator Debra Shore told The Blade in September the state plan was approved because the federal agency believed it met obligations under the Clean Water Act, but would not elaborate why or discuss the dissolved reactive phosphorus controversy. Tera Fong, U.S. EPA’s Midwest regional water division director, pointed out on the same call that regulations allow for a TMDL review every two years, though.

Mr. Byers continues to be frustrated, too.

“The water crisis brought Toledo unwelcome worldwide attention for a civic and social problem that should be unthinkable,” Mr. Byers said. “Yet 10 years on, neither the state or federal authorities whose job it is to ameliorate if not prevent such problems have taken a single meaningful measure to prevent recurrence, even though the cause of the problem is known to them, as it is to all of us.”