PrintMore than 400,000 in Toledo area told not to drink the water
There's a real urban nightmare in Toledo, Ohio today as algae blooms in Lake Erie have released deadly toxins, making the drinking water drawn from the lake undrinkable - even if boiled.More than 400,000 residents in two counties are affected.
Governor Kasich has declared a state of emergency as residents queue up at stores for bottled water.
At the moment, there's not nearly enough to go around.
A once-unthinkable crisis in the world’s greatest freshwater region — one that sent more than 500,000 metro Toledo residents scrambling for bottled water Saturday — enters its second day today, with officials inside the city’s Collins Park Water Treatment Plant wondering how much longer it will take before clean, safe, and reliable tap water will flow again from faucets of area homes and businesses.
“We’ve been getting mixed results,” Jeff Martin, a senior chemist at the plant, confessed during an exclusive interview with The Blade on Saturday while performing tests for microcystin — a toxin produced by the harmful blue-green algae known as microcystis — inside the plant’s laboratory on samples drawn from 39 metro Toledo sites.
The cause of the microcystis algae bloom is primarily phosphorus from farm fertilizer runoff, and the amount of phosphorus determines the bloom’s size. Scientists are also learning that another farm fertilizer, nitrogen, affects the size and composition of the annual bloom.
Toledo sits on the shoreline of the Great Lakes, which holds 20 percent of the world’s fresh surface water.
A small water treatment plant in Ottawa County’s Carroll Township was Ohio’s first to be overwhelmed by the toxin last September.
Until 2 a.m. Saturday, city and state environmental officials maintained such a crisis was unlikely in Toledo because the water plant is western Lake Erie’s largest and most sophisticated.
But after seeing symptoms of a problem emerge late Friday — a series of suspicious test results that showed a pattern of contamination — officials were told by the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency to issue the city’s first “do not drink” or boil warning to the system’s customers.
The warning went out on Facebook, followed by a series of news conferences.
Toledo Mayor D. Michael Collins said he was notified about 10 p.m. Friday that the numbers weren’t good — even though the algae season has barely begun.
About midnight, he heard of the Ohio EPA’s plans to issue a warning against drinking the water.
But after seeing symptoms of a problem emerge late Friday — a series of suspicious test results that showed a pattern of contamination — officials were told by the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency to issue the city’s first “do not drink” or boil warning to the system’s customers.
The warning went out on Facebook, followed by a series of news conferences.
Toledo Mayor D. Michael Collins said he was notified about 10 p.m. Friday that the numbers weren’t good — even though the algae season has barely begun.
About midnight, he heard of the Ohio EPA’s plans to issue a warning against drinking the water.
“I don’t believe we’ll ever be back to normal,” the mayor said during an evening news conference. “But this is not going to be our new normal. We’re going to fix this. Our city is not going to be abandoned.”
There is some confusion among the experts who are testing the water, who say that because the federal government has failed to develop uniform testing standards for the bacteria, no one is exactly sure if the water is potable or not. The Ohio EPA, erring on the side of caution, issued the order.
But the confusion means that no one is entirely sure when the state can give the go ahead to residents to resume drinking the water. Recent testing shows that the levels of toxins are 1 1/2 times above the safe limit, but other tests have given different results.
It's a mess.
Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of gallons of bottled water is being diverted from other Ohio cities to Toledo and the surrounding area. Authorities expect to have distribution centers set up by later today. The immediate crisis appears to be manageable but no one knows how long the algae blooms will continue to release an unsafe level of toxins.
