DRINKING WATER - How to Protect Its Safety

"Keeping our drinking water safe through better detection" by WKYC Staff, WKYC.com 11/2/2014

It took a green glass full of toxins, and the loss of drinking water to some 400-thousand Toledoans to make clear what environmentalists and scientists have long warned:  Lake Erie is in trouble.

The toxic algae bloom that shut down Toledo's tap wasn't a freak phenomenon.  These harmful blooms are increasing in size and frequency, according to researchers who cite a confluence of factors.  Those factors include fertilizer runoff from farms, leaky septic systems, the increase in an invasive species of mussels and warmer temperatures.

Going forward, restoring a healthy balance to Lake Erie is a top priority.  And as the government, communities and environmentalists argue about how to do it, clearly change will not happen overnight.

In the meantime some of Northeast Ohio's brightest minds are working on a stop-gap measure.  It won't solve Lake Erie's problems, but it might give water treatment plants and communities the necessary warning to act in advance, as these toxic blooms form.

During the August water crisis, as fresh water was being shipping in from other cities, scientists from NASA Glenn Research Center were studying the algae bloom from the air.  NASA has captured information like this for years.  But during the crisis they shared their information with the City of Toledo's water treatment managers for the first time.  "When the incident in Toledo happened, we dramatically increased the number of flights we were going to do.  We were going to do something like 3 or 4 flights.  I think we ended up doing something like 15 or more flights," said Dr. John Lekki of the NASA Glenn Research Center.

Lekki and his colleagues have watched Lake Erie's algae blooms for years, capturing information from high above the water.  Their goal is to collect information that will one day build a better warning system for treatment plants and communities, when these dangerous blooms begin forming.  But after last summer, their efforts have taken on a new sense of urgency.

During flights over Lake Erie, NASA scientists use a small hyper spectral imager they designed.  To better understand its power and sensitivity, a traditional imager breaks up an image into 3 colors.  "What this camera does is breaks out the color into 500 different channels and from that every high resolution we can tell the difference between algae species in the lake," says Lekki.

As Lekki and his colleagues collect data from the air, Kent State University research partners hit the ground, taking algae samples from the water.  "The work I have been doing with NASA is going to allow us to take our prediction capabilities to the next level," said Dr. Joseph Ortiz.  By using the information he's collected, Dr. Ortiz is able to decode the pictures from NASA's imager.  "Think about the trees in the forest, or the plants in your garden.  They have different shades of green, right?  So we can use the differences in the pigments that are present in order to identify phytoplankton", Ortiz explained.

Kent State is also growing the harmful algae in their own lab.  The goal is to better identify it by color and ultimately translate the information faster.  "This will let us pinpoint specifically where harmful algae bloom are forming," according to Ortiz.

If scientists could better predict and track harmful algae blooms, just as we track severe weather, it could give communities and treatment plants more time to prepare.  "We would like to get to the point where we have the model.  Where we can predict where the algae is going to be two days from now," Dr. Lekki explained.

However, it may be another year or two before the process is perfected.  But eventually what is learned through this partnership could lead to better technology, such as a satellite imager to detect blooms from above, and handheld scanners used by water treatment plants offer more immediate feedback.