another city's water supply made toxic by algae

[donsu]

recently a town in our midwest had the same thing happen to their water supply. toxic algae. and I recently posted an article explaining that the toxic algae can kill dogs and cats that drink it. and I've read of it happening in Canada too.



Harmful Algal Blooms - China

Residents of a city in eastern China rushed to buy bottled water after tap supplies became putrid from an algae outbreak in a nearby lake, state media said on Thursday. The lake in Jiangsu province is at its lowest level in 50 years and blue-green algae has been spreading, leaving the water that usually supplies Wuxi smelly and undrinkable. Panicked residents picked supermarkets clean of bottled water and small shops hiked prices, local papers reported, as an expert warned the problem could last for months. The volatile mix of pollution, thirsty citizens and health worries echoed a panic in late 2005, when millions of residents of Harbin in northeast China had tap water cut off for weeks after a toxic spill in the Songhua River affected drinking water. China's leaders have promised to clean the country's air and water, but decades of unchecked growth and rickety enforcement leave many places vulnerable to pollution outbreaks. Officials in Wuxi, a thriving industrial centre with an urban population of over 2.3 million, quickly sought to ward off panic. Yang Weize, party secretary of Wuxi, vowed on Wednesday to guarantee safe drinking water "at all costs". An unnamed spokesman for the city government told a local newspaper that about one-third of residents still had tap water untainted by algae. Officials have been constantly monitoring the lake and ensuring bottled water is available, he said. Many of China's lakes and rivers are threatened by run-off from fertilizers, dumped industrial waste and untreated sewage. Algae blooms can burst out in water rich in nutrients from farm and domestic runoff, experts as saying low water levels this year encouraged the outbreak. Wuxi will try to artificially induce rain to swell the lake, and the province government has agreed to divert more water from the Yangtze River. But the Shanghai Morning Post quoted one water expert as warning the outbreak could stretch through summer. "As temperatures rise in coming months, the spread of algae on the lake will expand," it cited Hu Weiping of the Chinese Academy of Sciences as saying.
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I got this info in an email from RSOE Emergency and Disaster Information Service
you have to reg.

[glowing]

1. The gift of Monsanto keeps on giving. Thanks to their modified

seeds, fertizlizer use is even higher than organic farming would use.

[hedgehog]

2. Some kinds of algae are just smelly as opposed to toxic.

I can remember summers in Buffalo when the water coming out of the taps reeked of chlorine because of the algae blooms in LAke Erie.