It’s going to get worse, and it’s going to get worse in a big way.” — Steven Chapra, environmental engineering professor, Tufts University “When water bodies warm up earlier and stay warmer longer … you increase the number of incidents,” said Wayne Carmichael, a retired Wright State University professor specializing in the organisms.
Long linked to animal deaths, high doses of the toxins in humans can cause liver damage and attack the nervous system.
In the largest outbreaks, hundreds have been sickened by blooms in reservoirs and lakes, and officials in some areas now routinely close water bodies used for recreation and post warnings when blooms occur.
“It’s absolutely certain in my mind that warming temperatures are going to end up causing more of these algal blooms,” said Steven Chapra, an environmental engineering professor at Tufts University.
2016 Utah Bloom Sickened More Than 100 People In Utah, a 2016 algae bloom in a recreational-use lake sickened more than 100.
Officials only recently started carefully logging the blooms, but they seem to be becoming more intense, said Ben Holcomb, a biologist for Utah’s environmental agency.
“I don’t think any state is isolated.” In Lake Erie, a major bloom in 2014 caused authorities to warn against drinking tap water in Toledo, Ohio, for more than two days, cutting off the main water source for more than 400,000 people.
Officials in both states say they’ve largely been able to stop them from toxifying drinking water.
In Oregon, officials lifted Salem’s drinking water advisory after several days, but then had to re-issue the warning.
Officials also warned that dozens of other water supplies could be vulnerable, and indeed, when workers from the city of Cottage Grove inspected another reservoir, they found a bloom, according to a report by Oregon Public Broadcasting.