Toledo has become a national poster child for better water-treatment plants, fewer algae-inducing nutrients, and efforts to combat climate change for America’s top environmental official.
While addressing 20,000 people at North America’s largest water summit Monday, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy said the water crisis that gripped metro Toledo’s 500,000 water customers during the first weekend in August “should be a wake-up call” for reducing water pollution nationally.
She used Toledo to explain why America needs more than $635 billion in repairs to water infrastructure over the next 20 years.
“Toledo isn’t going away,” Ms. McCarthy was quoted by Bloomberg BNA as saying at the event, the Water Environment Federation’s annual Technical Exhibition and Conference at the New Orleans Morial Convention Center.
“It’s 2014, folks, and in the most prosperous nation on Earth, for two full days, people couldn’t access water,” she said about the Aug. 2-4 incident, which actually spanned 56 hours during which tap water was deemed unsafe.
Ms. McCarthy made several Toledo references during her speech.
“What happened in Toledo was just the symptom of two larger problems,” she said, according to the official transcript of her speech. “Nutrient pollution, and the toxic algae it feeds, is a challenge all over the country. So is financing water infrastructure, the treatment plants, pipes, drains, and concrete that move water to and from our homes, are falling apart. As budgets get squeezed, needed improvements get put off.”
Ms. McCarthy said she has implored state environmental managers and mayors of Great Lakes cities “to work together and share our skills and smarts.”
“Toledo wasn’t a surprise event, and Toledo wasn’t alone, in that the challenges are large, and the resources are small,” she told conference attendees.
Climate change, Ms. McCarthy said, “is changing the way we think about our water.”
According to a 2013 American Society of Civil Engineers report, $27 billion of water and wastewater improvements are needed in Ohio, and $15.5 billion are needed in Michigan.
Toledo Mayor D. Michael Collins said Ms. McCarthy’s presence at a water summit in Chicago last week for Great Lakes mayors confirmed in his mind that the Obama Administration “has taken on a new sense of importance for the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River.”
The National Wildlife Federation’s Great Lakes office in Ann Arbor shares Ms. McCarthy’s sense of urgency “as well as her sense that what happened in Toledo really is a tipping point for freshwater protection and climate action,” according to Frank Szollosi, a manager of regional outreach for the group and a former Toledo city councilman.
Contact Tom Henry at: thenry@theblade.com, 419-724-6079, or via Twitter @ecowriterohio.
First Published October 1, 2014, 5:46 p.m.
