(00:00:00) Eutrophication is the scientific term. That means the Aging of the Lakes due to the presence of nutrients in the water phosphorus is a natural substance. And one of the nutrients that comes into the Lakes from many natural sources, but which was accumulating and excessive quantities because of the activities of man industry people living on the shores the sewage treatment plants that were discharging into the lake and which was accumulating in highest qualities in those Lakes where there were more population. For example Lake Erie, which was the most notorious and received the most attention in the late 60s and early 70s had and still has the highest levels. phosphorus and it is the presence of excess phosphorus that triggers the growth of algae if the algae grow in sufficient quantity and Decay and then cells contribute to the nutrient level of the lake. You can set up a permanent cycle of of overloading and lead to more and more accumulation of algae in biomass in the lakes in small lakes. It's easier to understand the process by which a small like becomes more and more choked with algae and growth and eventually could become solid land. That's a eutrophication process. It is pretty hard to imagine that happening to the great lakes and I don't think anyone ever suggested that they could possibly become solid land nevertheless. It was the acceleration of the eutrophication process that caused so much concern about the Great Lakes. In the in the late 60s effectively eutrophication would mean a dead Lake not as far as plant life, but as far as animal life, well, what is usually what is really meant by the term Dead Lake? And what was meant when they talked about Lake Erie is a dead lake is the consumption of oxygen in the central Basin of Lake Erie what was happening and it's still happening was that the excess phosphorus was triggering algae blooms in mid-summer, which would Decay and consume the oxygen and so that we had every year a period of time when there was no oxygen at all in a large part of Lake Erie and no life can exist where there is no oxygen and that's really what is meant when they talk about a dead like the as the algae in Lake Erie Decay and they sink to the bottom. They become part of the sediments. And as I said earlier that contribute to the the phosphorus level and we get we can set up a cycle Lake Erie was particularly vulnerable because it is shallow. It's a shallowest one of the Great Lakes an average depth of 50 feet or so compared to several hundred feet in Lake Superior. And some people have said Lake Erie is like wide place in a river the water flows through at one end and it flows out at the other end in just a few years time. Whereas Lake Michigan for example is a large cul-de-sac the water enters from the north end of Lake Michigan and it also flows out from North End of Lake Michigan and they scientists believe that the residence time of water in Lake Michigan is more like a hundred years so that with the accumulation of excessive phosphorus in the South End of Lake Michigan from the concentration of cities and Industry at the The end of Lake Michigan there was a great deal of concern that it would be much longer period of time before you could reverse that Trend Lake Superior has the least phosphorus. In fact, there are some people who feel that Lake Superior could benefit from having more phosphorus because there would then be more plant life microscopic life both plant and animal and and more abundant fish life. But overall, it was a presence of excessive phosphorus that and the acceleration of unification that triggered the concern now, this is not to say the phosphorus is the only problem with the Great Lakes have one of the things that has happened in the last 10 years is that we have come to understand About the presence of toxic chemicals and the contamination of the biological systems in the Great Lakes by the toxic chemicals and the processes by which we can prevent increasing phosphorus loads, or we can reduce phosphorus loads do not help remove toxic substances enough. So what we're now confronted with is the need to prevent additional toxic contamination and to remove what is already there where we can we and the concern has been that the process by which the toxic Center the biological systems is through entering the food chain and the toxic substance get into the water effect the microscopic life, which is eaten by larger forms of life and bio accumulate or concentrate as it goes higher in the food chain and in the fatty fish and this is pretty well understood, I think because a great deal has been written about it and reported about it but concentrates in the fatty tissue of the fish, we first understood that this was happening with DDT in the Great Lakes soon after the use of DDT was cut greatly and then band we discovered that there was another class of chemicals the polychlorinated biphenyls or pcbs which has some of the same kinds of Jurassic set is that they also bio accumulate and fatty tissue and the concern is that they are more long-lived and more persistent than ddt's and there is a still a great deal of uncertainty about how long it will take for the pcbs to be removed from the biological systems of the Lakes. Even if no more pcbs. Enter. The Lakes comes a new complication. Another thing we have learned in as we have made more effort to understand how the the to understand is the systems of the lake is that much of the pollution of the Lakes is entering through the atmosphere in this 1960s. We concentrated on setting water quality standards in 1972. The Water Pollution Control. Act was passed which established a permanent system for industry. And required that industry established pollution controls and for are as as well as water or air as well as water, but I'm speaking of the Water Pollution Control Act and and the relationship between air and water quality was not understood at that point. So there was a distinction made. I mean we thought we were controlling we were trying to clean up the air to keep the air clean. We did not know at that point that we needed to clean up the are also in order to keep the water clean, but that's what we Now understand and At first it was thought that this was a local situation. It was first discovered again because of phosphorus the amount of phosphorus in Lake Michigan was higher than could be accounted for in the early 1970s as the controls by industry and the municipal treatment plants came into being and we knew that there was a great deal less phosphorus coming out of those pipes into the lake, but we still had phosphorus levels like rising in the lake so scientists in Chicago and Milwaukee measured rainfall and snow and discovered that that phosphorus was getting into the lakes in this way having discovered. The phosphorus is getting into the lakes that way they started looking for other substances and sure enough it now appears that the atmosphere is the main means by which pcbs have gotten into the Lakes. Maybe there are some local situations such as at to Waukegan Harbor on in Northern, Illinois where there was one company that discharged very large quantities of pcbs directly into the lake, but it is only the transport of pcbs through the atmosphere that can explain the high levels of pcbs found in the fish caught near Isle Royale, which is the most notorious situation in in Lake Superior. So air pollution is an even larger cause of pollution of the Great Lakes than the water pollution as we do achieve more and more control of the effluence. Yes, the air pollution relatively will become more and important at the present time. It's estimated on the basis of us the research that's been done that about 20% of the total pollution of the entire Great Lakes system is coming from the air but there's another thing that is happening that among the agencies and scientists and sort of what we sometimes call the Great Lakes Community of people concerned about protecting the great lakes that has come as a result of the understanding of the relationship between all of these factors and that Is more and more agreement that we must think of protecting the Great Lakes as a system as an ecological system in which all the factors relate to each other rather than trying to control on a problem by problem basis, which is what we started out. We start out thinking well, okay, we have to keep Mercury from getting into the Lakes we have to keep phosphorus and getting into the Lakes but in recent years both in Canada and the United States there has been a great deal of consideration given to what the implications would mean of trying to restore and protect the biological system. Now, the Great Lakes is the largest make as as a system make up the largest freshwater system on the face. Of the earth 20% of the freshwater on the surface of the Earth is in the Great Lakes system. And that means the Great Lakes themselves and their tributaries 95% of the fresh water on the surface of the lower 48 states is in the Great Lakes system and giving Global significance to to this system. And I think what was one of the things that caused so much concern about the Great Lakes was the realization that man was changing the forms of life in this system in these bodies of water as large as they were was one of the things that made people realize we really could affect the whole earth and but there are quite a number of different agencies and programs working for the great lakes and Act it's very confusing to people who aren't directly involved. One thing that gives an extra Dimension to the work being done on behalf of the Great Lakes is a fact that it is an international effort under those going to ask you about the Canadian connection. How how do they feel about the Great Lakes? How active are they as part of your commission as part of other organizations? Well, they have of course share the concerns and the fact that both countries had a common concern with the Boundary Waters including the Great Lakes led to a treaty between Canada the United States in 1990. But this Treaty dealt with an agreement on how to regulate levels for power production and for navigation purposes and and it was not realized at that time that control of pollution was also a matter of concern. They're only a very few scientists and 19:9 who were wondering why all the sturgeon had disappeared from Lake Erie, for example, and I I have read that the phenomenon that I talked about in Lake Erie of the algae blooms in the summer and the Decay consuming the oxygen was being observed by the late 1920s, but it was not until the 1960s that there was any organized effort to try to reduce or prevent this from happening but back to the question of the Canada and the United States the treaty was signed in in nineteen nine and it established. What is known. The international Joint Commission the international Joint Commission has three members from each country and the function of the international Joint Commission is to advise the government's what needs to be done on behalf of the Boundary Waters. It doesn't have any authority to cause things to happen. But the history has been that generally both the Canadian and US Federal governments have followed the recommendations of the ijc on matters of controlling lake levels and so forth. Well in the in the 60s as a concern with water pollution was growing in both countries. And there was negotiated an agreement under the original treaty. In other words. It became a part of the treaty between the two countries which was signed in 1972. And it's known as the Great Lakes water quality agreement what the agreement does is to set objectives that both countries will try to achieve one of the objectives was the one milligram per liter of phosphorus discharge. The agreement does not tell each country how to achieve the objective it recognizes that we have different forms of government and different actually in some cases different philosophies of treatment, but it also provided ways in which the countries would keep each other informed about what was going on and review progress and and dead establish some committees and Boards, which have members from both United States and Canadian agencies and universities. The most important one of those boards is the water quality board. The water quality board has representatives of the Great Lakes states and Canadian provinces as well as the federal agencies and they get together regularly and each year. They publish an annual report in which they report on the progress that's been made and this has in the years since the agreement was signed as come to be the chief means by which the public is informed each year was happening the Uri Man also provided that after five years the progress would be reviewed and booked and they would decide whether they needed to change the objectives that was done and in 1978 a new water quality agreement was signed the chief most there were several changes, but probably the most significant one is the fact that the 1978 agreement recognizes the problems of toxic pollution of Great Lakes and states that that is the most important remaining problem and Provides the objective that is said is that both countries will have agreed that they will prevent discharge of toxic substances into the Lakes by whatever means are possible the most recent water quality board report said overall that progress has been made in several significant ways and areas but there are still many problems remaining in the Great Lakes. One of the things that happens in each annual report is the identify problem areas Detroit is as far as phosphorus is concern by far the largest problem Detroit alone contributes about a fifth of the phosphorus that's still being put into the entire Great Lakes system. I believe that we'll see a good deal of relief from the Detroit situation soon both the state of Michigan and and the Federal Environmental Protection Agency have taken enforcement actions against the city of Detroit and we will see a substantial reduction. But when you have such massive problems, it takes longer to to solve them. The toxics problem is something else one of the things that we have to do. Now. It's agree that we have to do is we have to keep track of chemicals in a much more intensive way than we ever have before but we've learned enough about what kinds of chemicals are likely to enter the food chain that the through the ijc the Environmental Protection Agency has proposed a system by which we would have an inventory of chemicals that are being produced or used in the Great Lakes region and identify those that have chemical characteristics where they might affect the lakes and then go looking for them. They did that on a with one chemical they knew a location where it was being used they went and they sampled and sure enough they found it in the water. So this is given some encouragement that that it is conceivable to establish systems where we could do a better job of keeping track who's going to ask you what what the what chemicals are the major culprits in order of their their significance in the Great Lakes the chlorinated hydrocarbons and the heavy metals are the two classes of chemicals that cause the most difficulty Chlorinated hydrocarbons in and I'm not a chemist but they include DDT pcbs some other pesticides and they have this characteristic of Bio accumulating or and concentrating in fatty tissue higher in the food chain. They also generally are persistent chemicals. They don't break down easily. Some are more persistent than others pcbs are more persistent than DDT. The good news is that DDT did break down and is being has been and is being removed from naturally from the biological system more quickly than had been anticipated, you know, just practically speaking the levels are going down. There is much less DDT and and much less deed. T in the fish in the Great Lakes after only a few years there's disagreement as to what is happening with pcbs the state of, Michigan. last fall took several fish samples in which they found much lower PC B levels than they had thought they would find but the state of Wisconsin is not getting the same kinds of results and and it's you know, it's always requires an awful lot of checking to see whether you've just gotten a temporary phenomenon or there's some local situation there also seems to be some seasonal variation in the PCB levels in the fish, but this has been a an enormously costly situation to the great lakes and The Food and Drug Administration has banned the sale of fish that contain more than five parts per million of pcbs in interstate commerce and there's been a lot of concern. It's one of those situations a lot of concern about whether that level was too high the Canadians limited it to two parts per million and it is anticipated that actually the Food and Drug Administration will lower the allowable limit to two parts per million, which will keep even more Great Lakes fish out of Commerce than has already happened in Michigan and Wisconsin and Illinois Warren Sports fisherman against eating more than very limited amounts of the fish that they actually catch which has been another big economic burden because the sports fishing industry is is a very important in the in the Great Lakes and you're mentioning before about how these chemicals get into the water and you were saying that the acid rain or that the I think it's proper term for it acid rain the atmospheric precipitation brings a lot of the chemicals onto the surface of the Great Lakes and gets into the system that way but it's also wondering about land use and about pesticide runoff or chemical runoff from agricultural sources. All right. Well the acid rain phenomenon is related to but not the same as contamination of the Water by chemicals. the acid rain refers to the deposition of sulfuric oxides into the water and the sulfuric acid oxides are produced by burning fossil fuel and in certain lakes in the Adirondacks, it has been discovered that the Lakes have actually become acid and that the fish the cold water fish in those Lakes which are very very sensitive to changes in PH Level have died and with that Discovery began looking further and discovered that many other Lakes are being affected thousands of lakes in Ontario have already been affected and Ontario, which has many many lakes is in is expecting still more will be and there's great concern in the Minnesota and other Great Lakes states. The concern about acid rain does not extend to the Great Lakes. The side is say that because of the Limestone base the Limestone that underlies the Great Lakes region. There's sufficient buffering from the Limestone to counteract any effect from acid rain as such on the Lakes themselves. But in the region, this is a great concern as for land runoff as a source of pollution to the Great Lakes. There was a considerable concern about whether once controls had been put on Direct discharges from Municipal plants and Industry, whether land runoff would contribute sufficient pollution that we would have to Institute controls and there was a lot of concern about the costliness of such And then the worry was about runoff from urban areas and from agricultural areas. And so the I JC the international Joint Commission undertook a massive study, which lasted for five years to try to find out there were three questions that were asked how much pollution of the Great Lakes is coming from land use. Where is it happening? And what could we do about it? And because of the role of Agriculture the u.s. Chairman for this pollution and land use study was from the Department of Agriculture. The report of the study was made last year and there were some rather surprising results overall. It was found that there was not as much pollution coming from land used as had been thought. Insert some locations. There is a significant amount and that for in the case of Agriculture. There are some locations where there is runoff from excessive fertilizer, which is going in either directly into the lakes or into the tributaries of the Lakes which is adding significantly to the pollution. For instance to Lake Erie again, the Maumee River which goes through Rick Rich agricultural area is a major source of phosphorus 44 Lake Erie and the areas where there is substantial run off of of land or are referred to as hydrologically active areas, but what this means is that it would not be efficient or economical to require. The same kind of controls for all agriculture in all of the Great Lakes as may be necessary in these are hydrologically active areas where there's a significant amount of pollution was also found that the urban areas were not a source of much phosphorus from runoff, but the urban areas are a source of some of the chemical and toxic contamination that there's a significant amount of material from that gets into the Lakes by runoff from Storm Waters from in in some of the urban areas in in the Great Lakes. It sounds like from some of the things that you said that Progress is being made in controlling effluence into the Great Lakes industry made the most progress the most quickly there were complicated reasons why some of the cities were slower including the fact that in 73 and 74 President Nixon impounded the funds that Congress appropriated to build sewage treatment plants later. The Supreme Court said he didn't have the authority to do that. But it meant there was a substantial delay in getting on with with building sewage treatment plants, but we're beginning to catch up has been a lot of problem because some treatment plants about half of the treatment plans that were built and that were designed to reduce the amount of phosphorus were Not able to reach the levels that they were designed to reach. So there's been a lot of attention given to the question of operation of sewage treatment plants to get the treatment down the encouraging thing about the fact that it appears that we may not have to go to that lower level of phosphorus treatment is that in order to go to get below 1 milligram per liter in most situations. You have to use chemicals to precipitate the phosphorus out which creates a great deal more sludge and adds greatly to the cost of phosphorus removal. You might be wondering I've been talking about phosphorus removal. I haven't said anything about detergent phosphate bands, you might be wondering what the connection is because they've been a lot of attention to detergent phosphate bands in the Great Lakes and and there is an effect substantially a ban on Phosphate in detergents everywhere in the Great Lakes Basin except part of Ohio. The city of Akron has its own ordinance Banning phosphates, but the state of Ohio does not well the relationship is that removing phosphates from detergents was the quickest and cheapest way overall to get phosphorus levels down. It's not enough in and of itself but it contributed substantial and he's made a big difference and we're beginning to see a lot of good results in Lake Ontario. For example, been a substantial decrease in the amount of phosphorus in the water and in the amount of algae growing in the water as a result and it's also cuts the cost of treatment the city of Chicago estimates that it is saving up to 35 million dollars a year in the cost of treating it. Uh because of the ban on phosphate detergents and even Akron Ohio, which is a much much much smaller City feels that it's sewage treatment agency is saving eight hundred thousand dollars a year because of the ban on phosphates and detergents in in that City the evidence in support of keeping the ban on phosphates and detergents continues to grow that it has been worthwhile Canada also affect sooner than the United States the Canada Limited the amount of phosphates that it allowed in detergents and in for the same reason remember that at the time that was one thing that people were telling consumers the people in their homes that they could do to improve water quality is not used phosphate detergents. I wonder if there's anything else that people can be thinking about or can actually be doing in you know in a real way to improve our quality Well, maybe even you might talk about conservation because you said that was another one of the main issues that that the Great Lakes Basin commission is involved with although I presume that a lot of that in terms of the bulk applies really to Industrial conservation of water. Well, actually we have looked at at water conservation for municipal e supplied areas and we are now analyzing the effects of water conservation on agriculture and and for industry and we began doing this even before President Carter called on water conservation as a national priority last year. We have come up with some interesting findings. Now the Great Lakes is doesn't have a shortage of water within the Basin although some of our states such as Soda during drought years certainly has a shortage of water elsewhere in the state. But to generally the Great Lakes cities have ample supplies of water. However, it costs a great deal to treat the sewage from these cities. And so one of the main things that we looked at was how much saving in sewage treatment could be achieved with water conservation compared to what you'd have to do to get the water conservation. Well in general what we have found is that where you already have a municipal sewage treatment plant built, if you reduce the amount of water that goes through the Plant 15 or 20% you might cut the cost five percent the cost of treating the sewage. It's a significant but not a huge portion. What would make be much more significant and what we are encouraging people who plan for sewage treatment? So forth to think about in the future is that you could save enormous Capital costs for both supplying water and treating sewage in the future if you plan for water conservation, and there are many ways to achieve the water conservation in for relative small amount of investment for example the city of Elmhurst, Illinois. Had a situation where because of the limit on the amount of water that the state of Illinois can remove from Lake Michigan Elmhurst was having to get its drinking water from Municipal Wells. And they had like many suburbs of many cities. They had a tremendous increase in population and they were going to have to sink a new well and they decided and again instead to undertake a campaign to encourage water conservation and the city set up a program where they went door to door and provided to individual homes little devices to screw under the faucets to cut the flow from showers and and faucets and devices to put in the toilets to cut down the amount of water used for each flush. And in one year, we're able to put off in definitely a need to sink a new well, which would have cost a small City $600,000. This has encouraged the state of Illinois, which is to undertake aggressive concert water conservation program, probably more aggressive than any of the other Great Lake States at the present time, but generally there's enough water in the municipal Isa supplied areas and enough of a delivery system already in place for about 30 years the big savings though to the individual house holder that comes with cutting the amount of water that's used turns out to be energy that the amount of fuel that is needed to heat hot water is so great that an individual householder who cuts down the amount of water and especially hot water that is used will make significant Savings in energy a few dollars a year for each household. If you add it up for the whole region or the whole country becomes a significant saving, so there may be some other reasons not related to whether or not there's enough water. To encourage water conservation we found when we were doing our study that the operators of Municipal Drinking Water Systems became very agitated at the thought that we might encourage water conservation and because they have their systems in place and built and they have to have a certain amount of Revenue in order to pay for that system and each situation would require an analysis to see where the cutoff line would be. So you could have a situation. In fact, this happened in California during the big drought out there in Marin County where they absolutely had to have water conservation because they had didn't have the water they had to raise people use a lot less water, but they had to pay more for it. There was a lot of question as to whether Or when the rains came people would continue to conserve water so far the experience out there seems to indicate that although the consumption is come back up some what they think it will level off at something like 15 to 20% less than before the drought probably evidently in part because new Plumbing fixtures were installed which just conserve water. They just use less water and in part because people just live differently and are using less water and are more conscious in this day and age of worry about the cost of government and the cost of paying for government services. I believe a great deal more attention will be paid to to whether conservation could avoid either building new water-supply systems with To growth or new sewage treatment plant capacity when you were talking about controlling effluence into the Great Lakes both on the level of water quality and the level of phosphorus and in the aspect of toxins, and we seem to be making great deal of progress in that area, but I'm wondering if in general there has been a turn around in the Great Lakes as an entire system. Is it getting better? Is it getting worse? Do we have as good a control on toxins? Especially atmospheric toxins as we can have overall I think We can be encouraged by the degree to which we have been able both to limit continued pollution of the lakes and to understand what what has happened. We still have significant problems. We have to think about what will happen with population growth that we have to think ahead and our analysis shows that 1 milligram per liter limit on phosphorus would be sufficient to 1990 and the year 2000 in the areas that we've looked at today eight, but beyond that the with population growth we would again see phosphorus levels Rising because of the size of the lakes and the amount of water in the Lakes they respond. Slowly and I started out by saying that the Great Lakes Basin commission is charged with planning for the future of the Great Lakes. And so we are concerned with what would happen in several decades from now as well as what has already happened. We know we do not have as much control on toxic pollution as we need as fact as we must have toxic contamination of the Great Lakes is potentially a threat to human health. It has already caused enormous economic damage most immediate way to see that in the nerves of the fishery of the Great Lakes, but Oh, we're not at a situation where throughout the Great Lakes toxic substances are a threat to drinking water but we have instances in which we already see that that can happen. I mentioned Waukegan Harbor Illinois. There are thousands of parts of PCB per million in the sediments at the bottom of Waukegan Harbor came from one Company. The company is no longer putting pcbs into while Keegan Harbor or Lake Michigan, but the pcbs that are there will stay there for a long time unless we remove them in the drinking water is taken from that location and there is an enormous concern on the part of the public health officials in the city of Waukegan and the great and about what to do about it. Well, you might say why don't you just stretch them out? One of the problems with dredging and first of all, it's very hard to dredge in the Great Lake itself. But even in the harbor the process of dredging stirs the sediments up and the worry is that the process of dredging might resuspend pcbs that have settled out into the sediments into the water and and and inadvertently caused a worse problem than we already have now. So lot of attention has been given into what to do in a situation like that but the public health Scientists and the water scientists are getting together on that that problem and that's one of the things that that that is happening as is and I come back to this notion that we are getting a lot more understanding of the relationships between events and and effects and and so forth. So we have to look at the system's effect. Yeah. It's another thing that we've been finding out more about is how far pollution travels we've come to have an appreciation that the source of the pollution may be hundreds of miles away as again, the Isle Royale situation is an example. There was nowhere near close by a source of the pcbs that were found in the fish near near Isle Royale, but there's a great deal of evidence that sulfur dioxides for example travel hundreds of miles to affect vegetation and water quality and so The lakes in the Adirondacks may have been affected by the burning of coal from New Jersey very likely. I know that there's of one study on the Ohio River about the effect of a of an anticipated concentration of power plants along the Ohio river found that sulfur dioxide is carried from power plants that are already along the Ohio River reaches far as Florida and One Direction and and to Lake Michigan in another Direction depending on the winds and this of course been observed in Europe where the Scandinavian countries have been affected by sulfur dioxide carried across the North Sea from England with all the known contaminants of water these days. Can we still say which of the Great Lakes is the least polluted Lake Superior? You're certainly the cleanest one of the Great Lakes and though it too has certainly had its localized problems, which are well known. But overall Lake Superior is a is the cleanest of the Great Lakes Lake Huron, probably next and Lake Michigan and next and then Ontario and Erie have the worst problems.