April showers are a symbol of spring and renewal.
But in recent years, they also signal a huge problem. Every inch of rain that falls from March through June helps determine how bad the toxic blue-green algae bloom will be in Lake Erie and other Ohio waterways.
“It’s the spring rains that result in the summer blooms,” said Kenneth Krieger, director of the National Center for Water Quality Research at Heidelberg University in Tiffin in northwestern Ohio.
Krieger oversees a team of researchers who track fertilizers that wash from farm fields into the Maumee and Sandusky rivers. Dissolved phosphorus from those fertilizers flows to Lake Erie, where it feeds algae.
Heavy rain in the spring of 2011 flushed 473 tons of phosphorus to Lake Erie and helped grow a record-size mat of algae that stretched from Toledo to Cleveland. In 2012, the algae bloom in Erie grew to less than one-tenth that size, thanks to a near-drought that sent 69 tons of phosphorus into the lake.
This spring, a National Weather Service 90-day outlook that calls for “above average” rainfall has experts checking rain gauges and farm-industry advocates publicly pushing voluntary anti-pollution initiatives to help fight the algae.
“We’re not sitting on our hands,” said Tadd Nicholson, director of the Ohio Corn & Wheat Growers Association. “There are a lot of great things we can do.”
Scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who forecast last summer’s smaller algae bloom won’t offer a new prediction until June or July.“There are too many questions on the uncertainties around a seasonal forecast,” said Richard Stumpf, an NOAA toxic-algae expert. “ For the first 40 days, we’re a little under average” for rain.
Algae are a huge threat to Lake Erie’s $10 billion annual tourism industry. They produce liver and nerve toxins that can sicken swimmers and kill pets. They also create an oxygen-depleted dead zone where fish cannot live.
Toxic algae are a constant summertime problem at Grand Lake St. Marys in western Ohio, where farmers now face state-mandated limits on the manure they spread on fields.
Algae-inspired warnings for swimmers are routinely posted at other public lakes, including Buckeye Lake in central Ohio.
A task force of state agency officials, scientists and environmental advocates is working on recommendations intended to help protect Ohio’s Great Lake. A final report is expected in June or July, said Erica Hawkins, an Ohio Department of Agriculture spokeswoman.
Jeff Reutter, director of Ohio State University’s Sea Grant program and Stone Laboratory on Lake Erie, said he expects the report to seek a 40 percent reduction in phosphorus that rains wash into Lake Erie.
How to cut that phosphorus is unclear. Farming advocates say more study is needed to learn how much phosphorus rains wash off farms and the best means to reduce it.
Kirk Merritt, director of the Ohio Soybean Council, said a $2 million OSU “edge of field” research project, which their group helps fund, should provide answers by 2015.
Until then, the Soybean Council, Ohio Farm Bureau Federation and state officials are encouraging farmers outside Grand Lake St. Marys to take voluntary steps to cut phosphorus. They include tests to detect how much phosphorus already is in the soil and planting crops farther from ditches and streams.
Lake Erie’s algae probably won’t be as bad this year as it was in 2011, Reutter said. “It’s highly unlikely we’ll get that same amount of rain this year.”