Last week, D’Arcy Egan of The Plain Dealer published an article entitled “Green Scum Coming to Lake Erie, But it has Been Worse.”
In it, he writes that Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs) will return to the Western Basin of Lake Erie — but they won’t be as bad “as the devastating 2011 blooms provoked by a steady parade of severe rainstorms rolling through the region in spring and early summer.”
In short, water quality is deteriorating in Lake Erie’s western basin due to huge industrialized farming practices in Northwestern Ohio’s Maumee River watershed. Now that deterioration is now starting to affect Cuyahoga County.
Dr. Jeffery Reutter is the Director of Ohio’s Sea Grant program and also the Director of Stone Laboratory, just north of Put-in-Bay. He is an expert on Lake Erie’s water quality — having studied it from 1966.
He’s seen it go from polluted (due to urban and industrial causes) to “clean” to polluted again (this time predominantly due to agricultural runoff). This runoff is creating the HABs — and the resulting plume has been captured by NASA from outer space; the images are spectacular and frightening, as you can see below:
This sequence of satellite photos of Lake Erie’s western basin shows the progress of the 2011 HAB:
A – June 1, soon after a surge of fertilizer-loaded storm runoff from the Maumee River has flowed into the lake basin;B – July 19, as the bloom begins to grow;
C – July 31, about two weeks after the bloom’s start;D – August 11, as the bloom spreads east toward the central basin;
E – Sept. 3, as the bloom reaches the central basin and a second phase forms on the basin’s north shore; andF – Oct. 9, as the bloom begins to decline in the western basin. (Courtesy of University of Wisconsin-Madison Space Science and Engineering Center)
Yikes!
