A little info about Lake Erie algae blooms -
50 years ago, there was still significant dumping into the Great Lakes. Lake Erie is especially vulnerable because it is so shallow. The lake used to heat up every summer - I want to say up to 80 degrees + I can recall swimming in the lake as a little kid, and the water wasn't cold at all.
Algae blooms used to be an annual event. In Erie County NY (Buffalo) you could estimate the amount of algae in the water just by smelling your shower - there was a nasty undertone drowned out by copious amounts of chlorine. The bathroom ended up smelling like a swimming pool.
That's what I recall. I can't say that the algae blooms then were the same species as those hitting Toledo now. My husband recalls people getting sick on the water, and that his folks used to switch to well water for the summer.
So - it looks like global warming is hitting 50 years of progress in restoring the lakes. If the lakes are getting warm, it will make for an interesting winter. Lake effect snows occur until the lakes substantially freeze over.
= new reply since forum marked as read
grandma and grandpa, aunts and uncles. I can still smell the godawful smell of sulphur.... I cannot imagine how many millions of tons of crap were dumped into the lake back then for years/decades. The tanning factory that used to sit on the bank of the Cattaraugus Creek must have surely dumped its own waste into the creek for many many years and that creek dumps into lake Erie.... I found some photos and I knew people who worked there when I was rather young. Please note the color of that smoke, you just know it was an environmental tragedy in those days. On edit to add pic of Bethlehem Steel site, today's version, yes that is Lake Erie that it sits on:
And this is/was the tannery:
|
The Eastern Tanners Glue Company was established in Gowanda in 1904 by German immigrant Richard Wilhelm and two other
investors. Wilhelm eventually bought the company entirely and, over the next 30 years, purchased nearly every major glue
manufacturer in the U.S. and Canada. He changed the name of the company in 1930 to the "Peter Cooper Glue Corporations," as
the result of the purchase of the Peter Cooper Glue company. Wilhelm became known nationally as "The Glue King." His product,
dried flaked glue, was used in countless ways by other manufacturers to make matches, plywood, book binding, electrolytic metal
refining, shoe soles, household cleaners, etc.
This gives an idea as to how close and "convenient" the creek was, salmon used to run this river/creek and I hope they still do.
On Edit to ADD how the weathy sometimes affect our planet:
The process of glue-making consisted primarily of boiling tanned hides and fleshings to extract the collagen. The waste products,
"cookhouse sludge," contained tanning chemicals such as chromium, arsenic and zinc. These sludges were stored on the property
and, in the 1970's, also in a nearby location . After the factory closed in 1985, investigations by the NYS Department of
Environmental Conservation determined that serious ground water, surface water (Cattaraugus Creek), surface soil and subsoil
contamination by these carcinogens was present. Remediation was carried out to contain and minimize the leaching of these
chemicals, but the problem continues. The Gowanda site was named one of the EPA's worst waste sites in 1998, and placed on
its National Priorities List.
We shipped the Tanning/Glue Factories over to China...and they are living through the pollution we sent them.
Wonder if we couldn't have cleaned this up with better technology and kept the jobs here in USA if there was a will to do it rather than shipping the "dirty, polluting jobs" overseas... We will never know.
I hope the salmon come back to your location. I wish we would do more to clean up our pollution now that the jobs are gone we should at least be able to have clean waters and air as the trade off. Yet it doesn't seem to work out that way.
Those of us who have memories of what was need to keep posting as long as we can. "History" in the MSM doesn't seem to focus on these issues anymore. Younger folks need to know what was before and compare it with today. Hopefully some change will come so that we can clean the mess up if we have to live with Walmart and all our stores purchases from China where we shifted our pollution and gave people starving wages as our unions died over here when the jobs left...(dirty as those jobs were).
Recommend!
[link:
|
