TOXIC ALGAE
Water ski event canceled over Juneau Park Lagoon concerns
Three years after a toxic algae bloom knocked out the drinking water supply for nearly 500,000 people in and around Toledo, Ohio, a similar scourge has hit Milwaukee’s Juneau Park Lagoon at a most unfortunate time.
Just days before an international “extreme” water ski competition was scheduled for the 14-acre lake sandwiched between Lake Michigan and Lincoln Memorial Drive on Milwaukee’s east side, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Zilber School of Public Health found levels of a naturally occurring “cyanobacteria” at levels 10 times beyond the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s standards for recreational waters.
“The event is being canceled due to health and safety issues,” Milwaukee County Parks system spokesman Ian Everett said Wednesday.
A separate boating event scheduled for the lagoon last weekend — the Milwaukee Dragon Boat Festival — was moved to the waters off Maier Festival Park due to algae concerns. Everett said the water ski competition organizers considered that site but decided it would not work for their event.
The toxic algae, called microcystis, produces an odorless, colorless toxin — called microcystin — that can cause rashes and stomach illness in swimmers, and much more serious complications in people who drink contaminated water.
The lagoon blooms have become a common late-summer phenomenon. Excessive nutrients washing off the landscape are likely the cause.
“It is a symptom of a larger problem we have with inadequate protections for water resources and improper land management,” said Todd Miller, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Zilber School of Public Health.
Everett said signs will be posted
banning swimming in the lagoon and alerting visitors to the dangerous algae levels, but the lagoon will remain open to boaters and paddle boarders.
Park visitors Tuesday could be seen tumbling off their paddle boards into water that looked more like a kale-based smoothie than a healthy swimming hole.
“People should probably not be boating in that lagoon right now, let alone paddle boarding,” Cheryl Nenn of Milwaukee Riverkeeper said.
Nenn said she had contacted the county about the problem and was told that “aerators” were going to be used to inject oxygen into the water to, presumably, break up the algae blooms.
“Bad idea,” Nenn said. “They could actually aerosolize those microcystins, which can be inhaled and cause pulmonary issues among many others to recreational users or other residents using the park.”
Microcystin was the toxin that overwhelmed Toledo’s drinking water system in the summer of 2014. The city could not issue a boil order to make the water safe because that only concentrates the toxin, so residents had to rely on bottled water until the city’s water treatment plant could get the problem under control two days later.
Fertilizer washing off croplands west of Lake Erie was identified as the primary cause of what has become an annual problem on Lake Erie.