Q: In the 1970s, I remember Lake Erie being in the news a lot because it was so polluted. What were the major pollutants? Is it any cleaner? What shape is Lake Erie in now?
—Lance DeLoach, Thomaston
A: Phosphorous was the main pollutant in the contamination of Lake Erie during the 20th century.
In August 1969, Time magazine wrote “Each day, Detroit, Cleveland and 120 other municipalities fill Erie with 1.5 billion gallons of inadequately treated wastes, including nitrates and phosphates … . These chemicals act as fertilizer for growths of algae that suck oxygen from the lower depths and rise to the surface as odoriferous green scum.”
The Cuyahoga River, which flows into Lake Erie in Cleveland, was so polluted that it caught fire several times.
Lake Erie’s condition led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970 and the Clean Water Act of 1972, Wired.com wrote in a 2014 article.
The water quality of Lake Erie improved through regulation for many years, but the condition of the lake recently has deteriorated from the phosphorus runoff from agricultural land along the Maumee River, which flows into Lake Erie near Toledo.
“The amounts or loads of dissolved phosphorus entering Lake Erie have more than doubled since the mid-1990s,” states lakeeriealgae.com, a website created by the National Center for Water Quality Research at Heidelberg University in Tiffin, Ohio.
The runoff leads to algae blooms, which take oxygen from the lake and leaves Lake Erie covered by an “unhealthy, sometimes toxic, green slime,” lakeeriealgae.com writes.
An algae bloom in 2014 left 500,000 people in the Toledo area without drinking water for several days.
Andy Johnston with Fast Copy News Service wrote this column. Do you have a question? We’ll try to get the answer. Call 404-222-2002 or email q&a@ajc.com (include name, phone and city).
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