Dr. Laura Johnson, a research scientist with Heidelberg’s National Center for Water Quality Research, has been sought by various media outlets to shed light on the causes and solutions for Toledo’s recent water crisis.
The crisis, blamed on a toxic blue-green algal bloom that produced elevated levels of the chemical microcystin in the western Lake Erie basin near Toledo’s intake facility, forced city officials to ban the use of tap water for consumption and other uses for more than two days. The ban was lifted this morning.
Johnson said she wasn’t surprised by the crisis because late-summer algal blooms that have produced the microcystin have occurred in varying degrees since the late 1990s. What did surprise her to some degree, however, was the early timing of the dangerous bloom.
To read the whole story: http://www.heidelberg.edu/newsevents/2014/080514
