Lake Erie, Tributaries Cleaner but Still Have Some Toxic Sediments, Officials Say

Nearly 20 years after the Cuyahoga River last caught fire, officials say Lake Erie and its tributaries are cleaner than they have been in decades.

Scores of Lake Erie beaches will be open in Ohio this year, and more than 25 million walleye thrive in Erie’s waters. Boating has become so popular that many marinas in the Toledo area are running out of dock space.

A few decades ago, Lake Erie had only three clean beaches, and fish were dying at a rapid rate. An oil slick on the Cuyahoga caught fire on June 22, 1969.

The dramatic improvement has been caused primarily by a decrease in phosphates and other nutrients that caused algae to flourish in Lake Erie, using up oxygen and killing fish, said Laura Fay, a research associate for the Center for Lake Erie Area Research.

Better Sewage Treatment

Phosphate pollution levels were decreased largely through improvement of sewage treatment plants, she said.

Half the people living in the Great Lakes basin live near Lake Erie, including residents of Cleveland, Toledo, Detroit and Erie, Pa. Eleven million people use Lake Erie for their drinking water, Fay said.

Although fish now appear to be thriving in the shallowest of the Great Lakes, Fay said the bottom of Lake Erie and its tributaries has sediments contaminated with such materials as mercury and cancer-causing polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs).

Funding for research and cleanup on the Great Lakes has been decreasing, she said, even though contaminated sediments are a more chronic problem than phosphates.

“I hate to see people sit back and rest on their laurels,” Fay said. “We’ve really come a long way but the toxic problem is something we really can’t see. Some of the effects are really going to be subtle. We might have lower reproductive efficiency of walleye or darter but we’re not going to see that for a while.”

Pollutants on Bottom

The Cuyahoga River, which has ignited three times since 1936, remains an area of concern, along with several other Lake Erie shipping channels, because of the pollutants that have settled on the bottom.

The International Joint Commission on Great Lakes Water Quality, in a 1987 report, said sediments in the Cuyahoga are tainted with PCBs, ammonia, cyanide and lead.

Because of the contaminants, the Ohio Department of Health advises people not to eat catfish caught in the channel and carp caught in the open waters of Lake Erie, said Deborah Gray, a toxicologist in the Division of Epidemiology.

Catfish and carp feed on the bottom of Lake Erie, she said, and tests have shown that nearly half have PCB concentrations that exceed levels recommended by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The Health Department also has issued an advisory for all fish caught in the Black River in Lorain and the Ashtabula River in Ashtabula, which empty into Lake Erie. There is no advisory for the Cuyahoga.

‘Small Incremental Risk’

“An advisory is just that--an advisory,” she said. “We’re talking about a very small incremental risk to someone who would eat this fish. But what we’re saying is that there are still fish exceeding the FDA limit and we think people should know about this.”

But shallow Lake Erie is cleaner than many of the Great Lakes, largely because it is is able to flush itself every 2.6 years, officials said. The flush time for some of the upper lakes, which are 1,000 feet deep, is more than a century. Fay said Lake Erie also has more organic substances that bind up toxic materials.

Bob Wysenski, environmental scientist for the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency, said Ohio’s beaches generally are safer for swimming now than at any time in the last decade.