Though dawn was still hours away, the Smith family was awake — and scared. Alicia Smith, a mother of three, had received an early-morning alert about local drinking water.
She began calling friends and relatives to spread the news, and by 7 a.m., daughter Alexis was knocking on neighbors’ doors to get the word out.
It was Aug. 2, 2014, and the Smith family and 500,000 other residents in the Toledo, Ohio, region had awakened to a public health emergency. The local tap water was toxic. And boiling to purify only increased toxicity. With so many health questions still unanswered and limited bottled water available, confusion swept greater Toledo.
Tom Wippick, from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, collects an algae sample from the St. Lucie River in Stuart, Florida, in 2016. Algae blooms are becoming more common with climate change, threatening drinking and recreational water safety and public health.
Photo by Joe Raedle, courtesy Getty Images
It was an experience “you never would expect in the U.S.,” Alexis Smith, a high school senior at the time, told The Nation’s Health.
The three-day water prohibition was caused by a toxic algae bloom in western Lake Erie, the source of Toledo’s drinking water. And though no illnesses were confirmed by officials, the crisis highlighted the dangers of harmful algae to public health.
Algae is common in surface water and generally not harmful. But when fed by pollutants, the plant organisms grow and can transform into a thick toxic bloom hazardous to humans and animals.
Ohio has made progress keeping algae toxins out of its drinking water. Filtration systems have been upgraded and efforts made to reduce pollutant run-off. In 2018, Clean Lake 2020 became state law, allocating tens of millions of dollars to several lake cleanup programs. In March, Gov. Mike DeWine introduced H2Ohio, a statewide initiative to protect water quality. But many challenges still remain.
“Based on bloom sizes, we are not reaching our goals,” Pete Bucher, water resources director at the Ohio Environmental Council, told The Nation’s Health.
Ohio is not the only U.S. state with toxic bloom problems. During this year’s summer bloom season, Florida, Mississippi, New Jersey, North Carolina, Oregon and other states closed beaches and sent alerts warning of contaminated waters.
In recent years, hundreds of U.S. ponds, lakes and rivers have tested positive for algae toxins, according to a data analysis of federal and state records by the Environmental Working Group. Sixty-eight percent of people in the U.S. get their drinking water from surface water, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
EPA is studying the toxins and is expected to issue a federal standard on them for water systems, but that could take years. In the meantime, the agency has issued guidelines on water safety levels. But most states ignore the guidelines and do not test, the Environmental Working Group said in its August report. Only 20 states regularly test for and publicly publish data on microcystins, the most common neurotoxin in algae blooms.
“It is a worry for us, because how are people supposed to protect themselves if states aren’t testing, or if they are testing but not making the data publicly available,” Anne Weir Schechinger, Environmental Working Group senior economic analyst, told The Nation’s Health.
The federal government does not track toxic algae blooms, but indications are they have become more frequent. The media reported 441 harmful blooms in 2018, compared to 71 in 2010, according to a working group analysis Schechinger cited.
Science connects much of the rise in blooms to climate change. Warming waters accelerate algae growth, said Timothy Davis, PhD, an associate professor of biological sciences who studies harmful blooms at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.
“Blooms like it hot,” Davis told The Nation’s Health.
“We need to keep this on the forefront, because these blooms are only going to get worse — last longer, be more intense and potentially more toxic,” he said.
So far, almost all documented cases of human illnesses from algae toxins are from water recreation, such as swimming, boating and shoreline activity.
The toxins can cause flu-like symptoms including vomiting, diarrhea and sore throat, as well as liver damage and skin irritation, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. For animals, death is not uncommon. In August, a spate of dogs died after frolicking in contaminated waters in Wilmington, North Carolina; Austin, Texas; and Lake Allatoona near Atlanta.
Over the years, some people exposed to the algae have complained of neurological issues. In 2010, Danny Jenkins washed green algae off his dog after it played in an Ohio lake. The dog died and Jenkins was hospitalized for slurred speech, stomach cramps and numbness to his left side.
In 2016, an animal study published in Royal Society Proceedings B found that vervet monkeys exposed to bloom toxins suffered neurological damage similar to that found in humans with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
Contact with contaminated water or seafood may not be the only route to exposure. Last year, a study in Environmental Science & Technology indicated that bloom toxins travel through the air.
Eden Rogers examines algae on the Lake Erie shoreline in Oregon, Ohio, in 2014. The city of Toledo was under a state of emergency after toxic algae polluted the water supply, leaving about 500,000 people in the area without useable water.
Photo by Ty Wright, courtesy The Washington Post/Getty Images
“People might be subjected to inhalation exposure, serving as a previously unrecognized health risk beyond drinking water contamination,” Keri Pratt, PhD, a study co-author and assistant chemistry and environmental health sciences professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan, said in a news release.
Toledo is the largest U.S. city to have its water contaminated by a toxic bloom. But other U.S. cities have also dealt with the crisis. In summer 2018, polluted algae in a reservoir breached the filtration system serving the Salem, Oregon, area. The blooms likely were caused by nutrient-rich ash run-off from recent forest fires, Peter Fernandez, PE, BSCE, MURP, Salem’s public works director, told The Nation’s Health.
During Salem’s days of water advisories, Marion County Health and Human Services distributed clean water to county residents. The agency periodically inspected the water distribution sites and, along with Salem officials, took part in community outreach.
“As the local public health authority, we have an overriding interest in ensuring that county residents receive timely and clear information so they can make decisions about their health and the health of their families,” Alisa Zastoupil, REHS, acting supervisor of the Marion County health agency, told The Nation’s Health.
Since the crisis, Salem has upgraded its water filtration system and tests water each day at multiple locations. Results are posted online.
“We promised the community we would post every day,” Fernandez said. “Sometimes we’ve missed a day and people call asking, ‘Where is the data?’”
In June, Fernandez was in Washington, D.C., for a congressional briefing with the Water Research Foundation. He said at the briefing that federal research and EPA safety regulations are needed on toxic algae, and he asked for a consensus on the most accurate testing tool.
In Ohio, advocate groups and government agencies are tackling the primary cause of Lake Erie’s toxic blooms: fertilizer run-off from farm fields rich in nitrogen and phosphorus.
Policies and action plans have been written to reduce farm run-off. Among the strategies are offering farmers incentives to follow best practices in crop fertilizer management, and restoring wetlands and building buffer strips of plants and trees between crop fields and waterways to the lake.
The urgency in Ohio is bringing about innovation. Scientists are working on ways to detect toxic blooms faster. New technology is being introduced, and at Bowling Green State University, a program launching in spring will engage the public as citizen scientists.
Charter boat captains, beach managers and water treatment operators in the Toledo region will be trained to use a shoebox-size toxin detector, said Davis, who is involved in the program. Their data will help researchers build more accurate models of toxic blooms.
“This is not just an Ohio issue,” Davis said of harmful algae. “This is not just an Oregon issue. This is not just a Florida issue. It is an issue that impacts every state.”
Learn more about harmful algae blooms at www.epa.gov and www.cdc.gov.
- Copyright The Nation’s Health, American Public Health Association
