- [Narrator] Coming up on Great Lakes now.

a lawsuit calls for stricter regulation to fight Lake Erie's algal blooms.

- Now much progress has been made in reducing phosphorus?

Effectively zero.

- [Narrator] New rules target toxic coal ash ponds.

- They created the mess.

They have to clean it up.

They have to pay the dime for cleaning it up - [Narrator] And is lead behind the harm to Flint's children or something else?

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] This program is brought to you by the Fred A. and Barbara M. Erb Family Foundation, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, Richard C. Devereaux Foundation for Energy and Environmental Programs at Detroit PBS, Polk Family Fund, DTE Foundation, and contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

(soft music continues) - Hi, I'm Anna Sysling.

Welcome to Great Lakes Now.

Today we're bringing you up-to-date on several important stories affecting our region.

It's been 10 years since an algal bloom caused a drinking water crisis in Toledo, Ohio, but blooms and Lake Erie remain a problem.

We reported on the issue five years after the crisis, and a solution has not materialized.

Here's a recap of our earlier coverage and an update.

(soft music) - [Howard] What's become the new normal is severe toxic algae outbreaks in Western Lake Erie.

- Howard Learner is the president and executive director of the Environmental Law and Policy Center in Chicago.

And for the second time in five years, the organization is suing the US EPA on behalf of Lake Erie.

- [Howard] That impairs clean water.

It harms fisheries, it interferes with tourism and outdoor recreation.

It makes Toledo and northwest Ohio a much less pleasant place to be.

- [Narrator] Ed Verhamme is an environmental engineer at LimnoTech, which maintains a network of sensors that monitor water quality in Lake Erie.

- [Ed] The bloom here goes out about 12 miles offshore.

As far as the eye can see, the water's green, and if you look real close, you can actually see the algal colony.

It's not like a dye or a stain.

The water's green because all the algae are there.

- The blooms that we're seeing in Lake Erie represent an unnatural flux of nutrients.

When you have lots of nutrients and you have warm temperatures in the summertime and you have calm waters, that is conducive to the growth of bloom forming bacteria, cyanobacteria, that grow to really high densities and that produce molecules that are of concern due to their toxicity.

- [Narrator] In August of 2014, those molecules would make national headlines.

- [Reporter] Ohio's governor declaring a state of emergency after routine testing early Friday, showed the city's water supply had been contaminated by toxins known as microsistins.

- There was a very large algal bloom that sat out very close to the water intake crib, but the city didn't really know that the bloom was there until they started sucking it into their water intake, and the bad water was already at the plant.

- For now, nearly half a million people go into the workweek without being able to drink water from their taps, and businesses are expected to remain closed - [Narrator] To prevent more crises, the city of Toledo made expensive upgrades to their water plant.

Toledo Mayor Wade Kapzukiewicz.

- [Wade] Fortunately now, five years after the Toledo Water crisis, we have invested so much money into our Collins Park water treatment plant that we can take water that looks like this.

By the time it gets to your faucet, it really is among the the best drinking water that you can get anywhere in North America.

But it is a shame that the ratepayers of northwest Ohio have had to reach into their pocket for the half a billion dollars over the last couple years, needed to turn this into world class drinking water.

And by the way, there is no mystery anymore as to who is causing this problem.

Every scientific study of this problem has reached an absolute unanimous consensus that this is a problem caused primarily by agricultural runoff and agricultural interests.

- [Narrator] The Maumee River watershed drains 5,000 square miles within Ohio, 80% of which is used for agriculture.

Phosphorus is a key mineral needed for crop growth, and lots of it is applied to fields in the form of fertilizer and manure.

But when rain washes it off of fields and into the river and the river delivers it to Lake Erie, phosphorus can boost the growth of cyanobacteria and fuel algae blooms.

- What we know from the Ohio EPA and other data is that more than 90% of the phosphorus it gets into Western Lake Erie comes from agricultural runoff, and that's really from two places.

That's CAFOs, that's Concentrated Animal Feedlot Operations with thousands and thousands of chickens and pigs and cattle.

And then that's fertilizer, fertilizer that's spread on the corn and soy fields.

Rainstorm comes, it runs off, it gets into the tributaries , which go into the Maumee River and then make their way into Western Lake Erie.

- Those nutrients are running off into the water and the bacteria are able to acquire as much of this nutrient as they need, and they're able to grow almost uncontrollably, so they're able to grow to these really high densities that results in these large amounts of biomass that produce these toxins of concern.

- [Narrator] Jeff Reutter is the former director of the Ohio Sea Grant Program at Ohio State University.

- The way that really drives the concentration of phosphorous up is applying too much manure.

We now know that the vast majority of the manure is spread within two miles of a barn, so we tend to have over application of manure very close to animal operations, and that leads to excessively high concentrations.

I am a hundred percent comfortable in telling you that the animal operations are allowed to apply more than four times the amount that's needed for maximum crop production.

- [Narrator] Many citizens believed the water crisis in 2014 would be a wake up call leading to action.

And in 2015, the states of Michigan and Ohio, as well as the province of Ontario, committed to a 40% reduction in total phosphorus flowing into Lake Erie by 2025.

Across the watershed, agencies promoted voluntary practices farmers could adopt to reduce runoff.

Several years in, concentrations of phosphorus entering Lake Erie were still the same, but in 2019, researchers got a preview of what can happen when fertilizer and manure application is suddenly and significantly reduced.

Chris Winslow is the current director of the Ohio Sea Grant program.

- The fall of 2018 was very, very wet, meaning farmers couldn't do a lot of the things that they would do in the fall to prepare for the next growing season, and then the spring of 2019 was very, very wet.

And so what we know is farmers producers just could not get out in the field.

Half of the fertilizer that is normally purchased in a growing season was actually purchased.

Only about 15% of manure that is typically applied got applied.

- So the amount of phosphorous applied to the field went down by 62%, and in the runoff, we saw a 29% reduction in flow-weighted mean concentration.

So we were essentially three quarters of the way to our target.

We detected that reduction immediately.

What that tells me, one thing, it's we're gonna see an immediate reduction if we apply less, but the other thing that it tells me, legacy fields or these agricultural fields that have excessive amounts of phosphorus already on them, they are an important piece of the problem because we reduced the load by 62%.

We should have seen a larger than a 29% reduction in the amount of phosphorus coming in.

- [Narrator] In 2019, frustrated with the state's focus on voluntary action, the Environmental Law and Policy Center and the Board of Commissioners of Lucas County, home to the city of Toledo, sued the USEPA.

They sought a cap on phosphorus entering the Maumee Watershed by implementing section 303 of the Clean Water Act, regulatory pollution control, known as a total maximum daily load, or TMDL.

In 2023, that lawsuit ended in a consent decree requiring the Ohio EPA to submit a plan for a TMDL to US EPA, which approved Ohio's plan in 2024.

(dramatic music) - It took a lawsuit to force the US EPA to force the Ohio EPA to develop a TMDL.

- [Narrator] Fritz Byers is outside legal counsel for the Lucas County Board of Commissioners, a party to the lawsuit in 2019.

They feel Ohio's TMDL plan is too weak.

- We all know that Ohio's TMDL relies for the most part on voluntary compliance measures and ignores the science of what's causing the harmful algal blooms.

Hence, yesterday we had to file yet another lawsuit.

The parties in this lawsuit are the board of Lucas County Commissioners, the city of Toledo, and the Environmental Law and Policy Center.

We want, yet again, for the federal court to look directly at the US PPA and say, you have violated the law.

You have violated your own regulations by approving Ohio's TMDL, Revoke your approval to create an effective remedial plan.

There's no reasonable doubt that there's only one way to address the impairment of the Western Basin of Lake Erie, and that is to create a "pollution diet" that regulates the amount of dissolved reactive phosphorus that gets discharged in the first instance into the Maumee Watershed, and that eventually gets discharged into Lake Erie.

- [Narrator] Not everyone is on board at TMDL.

Agricultural interest groups and people close to the agricultural community worry that greater restrictions could hurt farmers.

- Whenever you use a reg, there are always these gray areas and there's often unintended consequences of those regs.

And I would tell you just from working with producers and farmers, one of those is going to be the cost of doing business.

And so I have a hard time wrapping my brain around any reg.

There's just too many variables and too many things out there that are going to make it very difficult.

- [Narrator] Jordan Hoewischer is the director of Water Quality and Research at the Ohio Farm Bureau Federation.

- I took the job with Farm Bureau after Toledo's water crisis and I asked one question, are we gonna be deniers of our role?

You know, as as the predominant landowners in this watershed?

And they said, no, we're gonna be at the table.

There's a a lot of things that come into play here.

It's not to take away from what Toledo has done for their citizens, but we focus on what farmers can do on their piece of land.

And it's an extremely, extremely tough business to be in because they are reliant on markets that oftentimes are really against them.

- They're looking at best management practices that would allow us to continue to apply too much fertilizer rather than a regulation that would prevent the application.

- There are a lot of lobbyists that want to fight against these reforms, that have strong vested interest in the status quo.

And there are massive money machines behind this, but there's no electoral activity behind this.

And that's why I'm hopeful.

All we're trying to do is get our governments to honor their promises that they have made to us and that they have made internationally in our name.

- [Narrator] In a written response to our request for comment, US EPA replied, "EPA received the lawsuit from the city of Toledo, addressing the problem of algal blooms in the western basin of Lake Erie will take all of us, it will take unflagging commitment and resolve, and it will take time.

- For more about algal blooms in the Great Lakes, visit GreatLakesNow.org.

In 2022, we reported on the problem of coal ash in our collaborative project "Poisonous Ponds."

There have been some developments recently.

So today we bring you an update.

(soft music) - [Narrator] The industrial history of the Great Lakes region was largely fueled by coal.

Coal ash is a product of burning coal, and it's often stored in ponds surrounding coal burning power plants.

Coal ash contains mercury, cadmium, arsenic, and other heavy metals which have been linked to cancer, heart disease, and thyroid disease.

Out of more than 1500 coal ash ponds, landfills, and dump sites spread across the us, the environmental group Earth Justice, says there are 88 coal ash dump sites within two miles of one of the Great Lakes.

Waukegan is a city of about 89,000 in Lake County, Illinois, about halfway between Milwaukee and Chicago.

Dulce Ortiz, a lifelong resident and community activist, is co-chair of Clean Power Lake County.

- Waukegan has suffered from industrial pollution.

We have five Superfund sites.

So we've seen the horrors that these companies have done to our community.

- [Narrator] Since 2013, Clean Power Lake County and the Sierra Club of Illinois have been battling with the owners of the massive power plant in Waukegan.

The concern is over two coal ash ponds about a hundred yards away from the Lake Michigan shoreline.

They are the byproduct of burning coal at the plant, currently owned and operated by NRG Energy.

Christine Nannacelli is with the Sierra Club of Illinois.

- Coal ash has been contaminating groundwater on the shores of Lake Michigan here for over a decade since 2010 was when we first saw groundwater monitoring show elevated levels of a variety of different pollutants.

- [Narrator] Although the power plant in Waukegan no longer burns coal to generate electricity, the coal ash ponds remain despite calls for their removal.

- Constituents here in the community have been wanting that plant closed, going back to the seventies.

- [Narrator] In 2022, Illinois State representative Rita Mayfield told us that NRG has resisted these calls, battling regulatory efforts in court, and proposing a plan to remove the coal ash from one of the ponds, but cap the other pond and leave the coal ash in place.

- So it's not that it can't be done, it's just that they choose not to do it.

So they wanna cap 'em in place, leave them there, and then let some future generation deal with it.

We're saying no.

- [Narrator] At that time, a spokesperson for NRG said in an email that the coal ash at the Waukegan site is having no impact on Lake Michigan or the beach, making removal unnecessary.

Adding that NRG monitors the groundwater around the ash ponds quarterly as required by federal law and that the ash ponds are not causing contamination.

And points out that the groundwater in that area is not used for drinking water, but while NRG maintained there was no groundwater contamination at the Waukegan plant, the Sierra Club of Illinois said the opposite.

- [Christine] They are checking the water because we get those reports and we see the ongoing groundwater contamination continuing at the same levels as we did originally in 2010.

- We know that our community has suffered so much from industrial polluters that have just gotten their millions of dollars, left the community, left us with just toxic soil that really nothing can be done until it's remediated.

(soft music) - [Narrator] For years, there has been a stalemate between Waukegan residents and the power plant.

But in April of 2024, the federal EPA issued four new regulations, one of which takes direct aim at the coal ash ponds.

Attorney Gavin Kearney is with the Environmental group Earth Justice.

- Now they have to do site-wide cleanup.

That's the biggest win in the rule.

If you look at the, at the states that have lots of coal ash, it's Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Wisconsin, to some extent Pennsylvania.

So this is a big issue for the Great Lakes.

- [Narrator] The new EPA rules eliminate a loophole that Kearney says the power industry has been using to avoid cleaning up the coal ash mess.

- So one of the things that industry has been claiming is that when the rule said that they have to eliminate liquids from coal ash, meaning no water that can then leak out into groundwater, that when EPA said liquids, they didn't actually mean groundwater.

They argued in legal paper specifically that groundwater is not a liquid for purposes of the coal ash rule, - [Narrator] Illinois State representative Rita Mayfield is cautiously optimistic.

- Well, I'm glad that the US EPA is understanding the hazards of this particular coal ash and that they are moving forward with demanding that these businesses be good corporate neighbors and clean up their mess.

- [Narrator] In response to the new EPA rules, NRG said in a statement, we have been and will continue to evaluate our plans with respect to the federal regulations published in May, 2024.

NRG maintains that capping the coal ash is the best option and said in the statement, the closure process will be quicker and less impactful to the environment, than closure by removal.

Frank Pettis, a community organizer with Clean Power Lake County, calls the new EPA rules, just another beginning in their long battle with NRG.

- They have an obligation to clean those up.

And the failure to meet that obligation is likely to result in something very similar to one of, you know, another superfund site.

And we already have five of the eight in Lake County.

We don't need another one.

- So we have to fight and we have to continue to hold NRG and other corporate polluters responsible.

- [Narrator] Meanwhile, the coal ash still sits in ponds, scattered throughout the Great Lakes region.

Under the new EPA rules, power plant companies have until 2028 to start removing the coal ash at their own expense.

- They created the mess, they have to clean it up.

They have to pay the dime for cleaning it up.

One of the concerns that we have is that in states where utilities are allowed to pass on the cost to rate payers, that some of these companies may actually try to make consumers responsible for the cost of cleanup.

Basically put it on your energy bill, the cost of taking care of their legacy of pollution.

- Well, we want the coal ash removed from our shores, away from our water supply, and we want to have access to our lakefront for the first time in any of our lives.

- For more about coal ash and the threat it poses in our region, visit GreatLakesNow.org.

10 years ago in Flint, Michigan, a state appointed emergency manager switched the source of the city's drinking water to the Flint River.

Soon after, Flint residents raised concerns about their drinking water, concerns state officials initially dismissed.

Marc Edwards, a researcher at Virginia Tech, ran tests and confirmed there was in fact lead in the city's water supply.

- Hello Flint.

- [Anna] Then in 2016, former president Barack Obama declared a federal state of emergency in Flint, and this led to a wave of protests and calls for everyone involved in switching Flint's water source, to be held accountable.

A decade after the crisis began, Bridge Detroit reporter Bryce Huffman spoke with Margaret Edwards, whose concerns about Flint have changed.

- When did you first suspect that that might have been overblown?

- There was about a two week time period where I was relieved that this was not gonna get covered up and people were taking lead water seriously before I realized that this narrative was spinning out of control.

- [Narrator] That narrative was that Flint kids had been permanently damaged by lead in their drinking water and that they were never going to properly develop mentally.

- But after that two week time period, I really got concerned because I realized that Flint parents and Flint kids were being told that they'd been subjected to some kind of unprecedented lead exposure via water that might permanently damage their brains.

And I tried to speak out against it, as did others.

But the major narrative was that this horrific lead poisoning occurred, when in fact the blood lead of Flint children never exceeded that of the average for the state of Michigan significantly, even during the worst of the water crisis.

So it should have been good news that we prevented serious harm, but instead, this story took on a life of its own.

And frankly, it's been running wild, ever since, almost eight years now.

- [Narrator] Initially alarmed about lead in the water, Edwards later began to worry that the narrative of irreparable harm was itself damaging.

- And so it really wasn't until 2018 when I realized that someone had to start speaking out against this.

So we started speaking out more and doing more research and trying to get our results published that said, this is really a false narrative.

And oh, by the way, this could really be hurting children to be telling them that their brain damaged and can't learn, when that never happened.

And the more I saw, the more I realized the amount of harm that was accruing to these kids.

And I just felt it was my ethical obligation to speak out regardless of the consequences.

- What happens now with those kids in Flint who for years have been hearing from the media, from clergy, from parents, from teachers, that they're not able to develop and learn the way that they should.

- I'm terrified at what's going to happen to these kids because the harm that's occurred to them is very, very real.

I do believe that many of the things that people are observing in terms of learning difficulties and acting out in school and disciplinary problems, are really occurring.

The question is, what is the cause?

Was it the lead in water or was it the fact these children believe what they were told?

And I don't think that story is true, but it is nonetheless very, very harmful to these children.

And so unless you properly identified the source of the harm, how can you hope to rectify it?

- Who should be responsible for repairing that harm?

Is that something that falls squarely on the parents, the school district, the media who, who needs to rectify this?

- Well, let us recall that the Flint water crisis and the criminality occurred when Flint people were lied to about the safety of their drinking water.

And I think we'd all agree that was horrible.

It never should have occurred and people should be punished for it.

So too, I think that telling these children the wrong information about their health is wrong as well.

It started with good intentions.

I was partly to blame early on because I didn't want this problem to get covered up, but it spiraled outta control.

And I think the main remedy is to start telling these children exactly what happened to them and that really the harm was not as bad as we first feared.

That they never really were exposed to these horrific levels of lead.

I feel the only way out of these sorts of problems to tell people the truth unvarnished.

And with that, maybe the harm can be partly ameliorated.

- Thanks for watching.

For more about the Flint water crisis or any of our stories, visit GreatLakeNow.org.

When you get there, you can follow us on social media or subscribe to our newsletter to get updates about our work.

See you out on the lakes.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] This program is brought to you by the Fred A. and Barbara M. Erb Family Foundation, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, Richard C. Devereux Foundation for Energy and Environmental Programs at Detroit PBS, Polk Family Fund, DTE Foundation, and contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

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