Creating a Smart Lake Erie

By Bryan Stubbs, Executive Director of the Cleveland Water AllianceIn recent years, Lake Erie had one of the greatest threats to its urban water supply: harmful algal blooms.This deep green gunk is a result of phosphorus-rich fertilizer runoff from farm fields. The runoff made Toledo, Ohio’s freshwater undrinkable for several days because the algal blooms added cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) to Toledo’s water system, which contains a toxin that can cause liver and kidney damage.This affected about 400,000 residents of Northwest Ohio and Southeast Michigan.Unfortunately, these algal blooms continue to appear and grow, although not yet to the same scale as in 2014. . . READ MORE.