Ten years ago, Toledo residents woke up to urgent warnings not to drink or use their water.
A toxic algal bloom in Lake Erie had contaminated the city鈥檚 water supply. Hundreds of thousands of residents weren鈥檛 able to use the water from their faucets for nearly three days, including Alicia Smith.
鈥淧eople could not access, drink, bathe their children or provide medical assistance when they needed to take their medication,鈥� Smith recalled.
Smith is a community organizer in Junction, a low-income, majority Black neighborhood. And she spent those three days in 2014 knocking on doors and giving out bottles of water. The crisis disrupted tourism, closed businesses, cost the city and fractured residents鈥� relationship with their water.
鈥淎fter something like that happens, you are no longer as trusting and as open-minded to the public health and safety as you once were,鈥� said Toledo resident Tiesha Amison.
The impact wasn鈥檛 just felt in Toledo: the incident garnered and served as a wake-up call to the effect of algal blooms on water in Ohio. In the decade since, community, city and state organizations have been working to curb harmful algal blooms.
The problem
A variety of different factors cause harmful algal blooms to form. They need lots of light and warm temperatures. But, Laura Johnson, director of the National Center for Water Quality Research at Heidelberg University, says, nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen drive the blooms鈥� growth each year.
Some of the nutrients come from metro wastewater, but she said only around 10% of the pollution comes from those so-called point sources. The biggest driver by far is manure and fertilizer washing into the watershed.
鈥淔rankly, it's impossible, given the area of land that is encompassed by those different land uses, for it to not be agriculture,鈥� Johnson said.