Like an annual rite of spring, researchers from across northwest Ohio met at the University of Toledo Lake Erie Center in Oregon on Wednesday to clean and calibrate sensors that will be going into Lake Erie in preparation for another summer algal bloom season.
The bloom is still several weeks, possibly two months or more, from forming, but the first of the lake’s smart buoys in what’s known as an operational buoy network will be deployed near Huron, Ohio, on Thursday to start collecting baseline data. Those in the Toledo area will likely start going into the water next week, Eddie Verhamme, a principal and senior engineer for Ann Arbor-based LimnoTech, which is in charge of deploying many of the buoys.
The technology is roughly the same as it’s been for years, measuring temperature, wind speed, and several aspects of what’s in the water at any given time. But new this year is a broader look at the lake, with at least one buoy deployed in Ohio Lake Erie water from Toledo to Ashtabula, Mr. Verhamme said.
Toward the end of last summer was actually the first-time smart buoys were deployed east of Cleveland, which doesn’t get that much algae itself. The main threats to water quality out there are oxygen depletion, a symptom of the lake’s so-called dead zone, and manganese, which can turn Cleveland-area source water brown at times.
But the deployment of those out near Ashtabula, where Lake Erie is much colder, deeper, and even less at risk for algal blooms, was just done on a brief trial run last summer. This year is the first one in which consistent data will be generated from each Ohio county that borders Lake Erie, Mr. Verhamme said.
That’s being done to produce “a more consistent approach to monitoring the [Lake Erie] surface water,” Mr. Verhamme said.
So many smart buoys are in place across the Great Lakes region that it’s hard to keep track of all of them, he said.
About 25 are in Lake Erie now, about 15 in Ohio, and 10 in Canada. They produce data 24/7 for what Mr. Verhamme described as the operational network. They are among roughly 70 producing real-time water quality data across the Great Lakes region. Multiple universities also put their own smart buoys in the water for research projects, Mr. Verhamme said.
“This event gets us to the same readiness point,” he said, referring to the cleaning and calibration activities.
In addition to those at UT’s Lake Erie Center on Wednesday, the Cleveland area will host its first-ever cleaning and calibration event at Cleveland State University MakerSpace, 2121 Euclid Ave. That also is expected to draw about 20 researchers, the approximate number of those who attended the UT event.
Also new is broader participation from other areas, such as Defiance and other cities in the Lake Erie watershed that use the Maumee River, not Lake Erie, as their primary source of drinking water.
This year’s calibration event included participation from the Ohio River watershed, as well.
Fred Milan, Del-Co Water Co. Inc. watershed protection coordinator, said he has been trying to attend for three years but was kept away by the coronavirus pandemic.
Del-Co Water, which is based just north of Columbus in Delaware, Ohio, is Ohio’s largest nonprofit water utility cooperative. It draws from the Olentangy and Scioto rivers, where it stores water in four reservoirs before distributing it throughout its eight-county, largely rural service area.
After it began drawing from the Scioto five years ago to keep up with the growing demand for water in central Ohio, its reservoirs began producing more algae. Algal growth in reservoirs has become a larger problem nationally because of how nutrient-enriched water lays stagnant in them. Adding the Scioto as a water source is believed to have introduced many more nutrients and, thus, more algae in Del-Co’s reservoirs, Mr. Milan said.
“Since we started using it, we're seeing all kinds of algae we didn't use to see before,” he said.
Climate change is exacerbating the problem. This year was the first Mr. Milan said that Del-Co didn’t have to break through ice to do water quality testing during the winter.
“We're all facing the same problem no matter where we're at,” Mr. Milan said. “It doesn't matter if you're down in Cincinnati or in Columbus or up here. To me, it's a climate change-driven problem.”
He said there will be more challenges for Del-Co once the giant $20 billion Intel plant begins producing semiconductors in 2025 or shortly thereafter. The plant, will is to be built in Licking County northeast of Columbus, will draw 5 million gallons a day of water when at full capacity, Mr. Milan said.
By comparison, the Anheuser-Busch plant on the north side of Columbus uses 2 million gallons a day. Ohio State University uses 3 million gallons a day, but has its usage spread out across multiple sites, he said.
Northwest Ohio’s investment in smart buoy technology came in response to Toledo’s 2014 water crisis. That event resulted in nearly 500,000 people in the metropolitan area being told to avoid touching or drinking their tap water the first weekend of August that year. An algal toxin had gotten through Toledo’s Collins Park Water Treatment Plant and breached the public water supply.
Smart buoys weren’t on the lookout for algal blooms back then. The primary warning was a phone call from Monroe to Toledo water plant operators, with the former warning the latter that a highly toxic bloom appeared to be heading toward Toledo’s raw intake in Lake Erie’s Maumee Bay.
Jeff Martin, Collins Park senior chemist, was among the many scientists praising the smart buoy technology again on Wednesday.
“This is very useful. It can give us an earlier heads up,” Mr. Martin said. “Everyone’s got buoys out there and we’re interlinked.”
Tom Bridgeman, UT Lake Erie Center director, said the annual cleaning and calibration events are important to make sure buoys are “in agreement with each other.”
Through the operating monitoring network, multiple high-tech sensors, each designed for a specific monitoring task, are bundled together in long tubes known as sondes. Each buoy carries a sonde that transmits real-time data back to laboratories, where water treatment plant operators and other researchers across the watershed share information as they see changes in Lake Erie and Maumee River water quality that can suggest formations of algal blooms or other problems.
“It's really useful to have them all calibrated [at] the same time,” Mr. Bridgeman said. “The sensors are absolutely critical for tracking blooms in Lake Erie. It's a big early warning advantage.”
First Published April 5, 2023, 6:54 p.m.
