As we enter into day two of Toledo’s water restriction. I’m sitting here at an undisclosed location drinking a cup of coffee made from well water, and thinking about how this problem came to be.
1) We have been talking about Algae water blooms on Lake Erie for a decades and how harmful they are to the marine life.
2) Toledos water intake is in Lake Erie.
If those Algae blooms are so harmful to marine life, how harmful would it be if ingested into human life?
Over the past decade, Toledo has spent a great deal of time a resources to protect our water system. Here is a couple of examples of our Toledo Water Managers protecting the system.
Toledo want to great expense to build a double fence security system around the water plant to keep potential terrorist from peeing in our water.
Toledo water plant built its own electrical power generator station to run the plant, just in case it losses power from both of the two totally independent power feeds into the plant.
Toledo replaced thousands of perfectly functional fire hydrants because they don’t have back flow preventers on them
So why didn’t anyone ask the question:
“What would happen if one of those really strong Algae blooms got into the intake? “
I bet water systems across the country are now looking at that question and will be watching Toledo to see what solutions we come up with.