[T]he 22 drinking water treatment facilities along Lake Champlain have begun monitoring for blue-green algae toxins.
Weekly monitoring will occur over the next 12 weeks and was sparked by an incident in which a half-million residents of Toledo, Ohio, lost their drinking water due to an algae bloom in Lake Erie during the summer of 2014, said Sarah Vose, toxicologist for the Vermont Department of Health.
The program will have all the water system operators collecting samples from their respective sections of Lake Champlain on Mondays, which will be picked up by the Department of Health and submitted for toxin analyses on either Monday or Tuesday, depending on whether the facility is on the north or south side of the lake, Vose said.
Blue-green algae visual monitoring programs have been in place in many regions of Lake Champlain for a few years, but this is a different type of monitoring program, she said. Vose said experts don’t know the relationship between what they see at the surface to what happens at the drinking water intake, as the intakes are located some depth below the surface.
“This is a completely separate effort than visual monitoring,” Vose said. “This is analytical testing of raw and finished water for two cyanotoxins.”
The bloom that lead to the Toledo drinking water crisis formed directly over a drinking water intake pipe in Lake Erie, miles offshore.
“After Toledo, there was a lot of scrutiny on our drinking water quality with the blue-green algae toxins,” Vose said. “Since there’s no federal Maximum Contaminant Level and there’s no EPA-required margin for this toxin, we saw it as an opportunity to get some data about what types of toxins are in the raw, untreated water, if any.”
Lake Champlain is the source of drinking water for 250,000 people in Vermont, New York and Canada, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Until 1990, there was no coordinated management program for monitoring the quality of the drinking water that comes from the lake.
James Ehlers, executive director of Lake Champlain International, said he has been advocating for such a monitoring program.
“It’s a good cause, but, from what I can tell, it’s not even remotely comprehensive enough,” Ehlers said.
The conditions of algae blooms can change from hour to hour, and Ehlers said he is unsure whether weekly monitoring is enough.
“It’s not clear to me that this is anything other than a rearview mirror program rather than a preventive program,” Ehlers said.
Vose said that conditions do change from hour to hour, but that can be seen from a visual observation of the surface.
Ehlers said he is also concerned with how the drinking water facilities located around Lake Champlain operate and will comply with the Department of Health in this new program.
The Champlain Water District treatment facility in South Burlington is not a concern to him, he said. They are a “well-funded, well-trained Cadillac operation” and “set the bar for other treatment facilities,” Ehlers said.
“We, as an organization, are very concerned with the impact on people being repetitively exposed to cyanotoxins and neurotoxins by our drinking water,” he said. “And no one can definitively say that it is or is not happening.”
This is part of the reason that the program has been implemented — to definitely find out, Vose said.
