The Toledo drinking water crisis was a wake up call for U.S. cities, but many Canadian mayors have known there's a problem with algae at home.
In August, kilometres from the shoreline of Toledo, Ohio, a blue-green algal slime slips into an intake pipe and releases a toxin that contaminates the water.
With no regulatory guidance or national standard to look to, Mayor Michael Collins makes the decision to shut off the drinking supply to 400,000 people, prompting a run on bottled water and a call to the National Guard.
In the wake of the crisis, Chicago’s mayor Rahm Emanuel calls a Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative summit in Chicago. Mayors and representatives from 23 U.S. and Canadian cities, as well as the American Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), attend.
But no one from Toronto goes.
The city hasn’t been part of the initiative since former mayor David Miller served as its chair.
And environmental issues have been on the back burner for Mayor Rob Ford (open Rob Ford's policard) who, along with a third of council, received an “F” last term from the Toronto Environmental Alliance.
But for the U.S., and for many Canadian mayors, the August event in Toledo was “a real crisis,” says David Ullrich, executive director of the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative in Chicago.
The Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence account for 20 per cent of fresh surface water in the world.
“That was the driving force and the focus of the summit: what are the things we can do in the near term to protect ourselves in the future?” says Ullrich of the meeting, which was held last week. “And to see what we can do on other problems as well.”
Ullrich told the Star he hadn’t heard from any of Toronto’s mayoral candidates regarding the summit.
Lake Erie has been under attack from massive blue-green algae blooms, which feed off the plant nutrient phosphorus from farm and waste water run-off and release the toxin microcystin.
The EPA pledged $12 million for extra monitoring at the summit and announced a Great Lakes action plan which includes additional funding to deal with algae problem. The agency also agreed to work with cities to create microcystin benchmarks.
Toronto’s water supply has never been compromised in the same way, but public health advisories on the toxic effects of blue-green algae, which can kill dogs and cause liver problems, diarrhea and skin rashes in humans, were recently issued for swimmers in Hamilton Harbour.
And to the east, the town of Ajax is struggling with a monumental outbreak of foul-smelling algae that is washing up thigh-deep on the city’s waterfront and could just as easily develop here.
“They’ve spent millions of dollars to have one of the most beautiful and accessible waterfronts in the GTA,” says Martin Auer, a scientist who specializes in surface water quality engineering, “and they literally can’t use it in the summer because of the algae that washes up on the beaches and rots and creates horrible odours of decomposition of plant material.”
The nuisance algae, called Cladophora, are a species native to the Great Lakes.
Cladophora doesn’t release a toxin but the plant, which grows at the bottom of the lake on rocks, cobblestones, solid bedrock and even zebra mussel beds, can destroy fish habitats and cause avian botulism.
Auer says it is responsible for the death of water fowl in Lake Michigan, including loons.
That “kind of breaks our heart because those loons are up in the north of Canada breeding and then they come down through and they pick up the botulism and they die on the way south,” says Auer.
When the algae wash up on shore, residents say the stench is overwhelming.
“We’re at the point now where literally metric tons of it are washing up on the beaches of Ajax,” notes Auer.
At fault, says Auer, who was hired by the town of Ajax, is the soluble phosphorus in the effluent from the Duffins Creek Water Pollution Control Plant in nearby Pickering.
The plant processes waste water for York and Durham regions and wants to increase its output from 360 million litres to 560 litres a day to accommodate York Region’s expansion plans.
An environmental assessment closed this week, but the town is asking the minister of the environment for an extension to consider Auer’s research, which will be ready by the end of the year.
The region says it is not at fault and points to a 2009 University of Waterloo study that says the phosphorus from Duffins Creek has “a relatively small influence on the conditions for Cladophora growth.”
Ajax, which spent a “considerable amount of tax payer’s money” to hire Auer, disagrees.
“This is a growing problem, that as this research comes to the forefront, the light’s going to be coming on and more and more people are going to get involved,” says Paul Allore, the town’s director of planning and development. “Just like after what happened in Toledo.”
Phosphorus levels are down in the open water of Lake Ontario as a whole and have been dropping for years, and the Durham plant is meeting its standards.
But Auer argues those limits need to be lowered to reflect what’s happening in the near shore.
“On the way to being mixed throughout the lake, it passes directly through the places algae grow,” he says. “And it’s not diluted. So it puts very high levels of phosphorus into the near shore Cladophora garden, and that’s what creates the problem.”
Zebra mussels have made the problem worse. The invasive species filters the water and makes it clearer so that light can penetrate to a 10-metre depth, which contributes to the algae’s growth.
“The problems in Lake Ontario today are limited to local areas where treatment plants discharge,” says Auer. “But there are 18 wastewater treatment plants discharging into Lake Ontario near shore in the Golden Horseshoe.
“If you realize that 6 kilometres to the west there is another treatment plant, and 6 kilometres to the west of that there’s another, and 6 kilometres there’s another,” says Auer, “and all the way around to St. Catharines what you’re doing is creating a bathtub ring of very high phosphorus around an open lake core of very clean water.”
Because the algae harbour bacteria, fecal matter from sewage mixed in with it can survive longer than if it were in open water exposed to light.
The algae are common in the Humber River area, says Auer, and Toronto can expect more.
“It’s all over the place from St. Catharines to Oshawa. It’s just a question of where you happen to be relative to where the wind blows.”
The problem of nutrient overload in the Great Lakes is something that all mayors around the great lakes should be aware of, says Steve Parish, mayor of Ajax.
“When you look at it, our issue in one sense is a small little thing,” he says. “But then you add Toledo and you add the Chicago meeting and you add the places like us around the Great Lakes that have similar problems. And if they’re not protected, if we don’t deal with this nutrient problem, it’s a threat not just to tourism and recreation but our economy.
It’s a point that Peter Ketchum, reeve of the Township of the Archipelago in Georgian Bay, agrees with.
Cottage owners in Sturgeon Bay, off Georgian Bay, who have tried to sell their properties have been unable to do so because of toxic blue-green algae that have developed naturally.
Ketchum, who attended the Toledo summit, has spent 10 years studying the problem and says cottagers are considering paying $1 million for treatment to get rid of the toxic algae.
“It’s a big issue to us,” he says. “It’s a big issue to the ratepayers.”
Cladophora covers the shore at at Paradise Park in Ajax in September. The town park has beaches, sports fields and tennis courts.
