Comeback for the Great Lakes

After decades of abuse, they are getting cleaner

"Lake Erie is a dead lake. Save the rest of the Great Lakes." So went the environmentalists' plaint during the 1960s. Lake Erie was not, in fact, quite dead, but it was suffering from a variety of serious disorders, including a seemingly uncheckable algae growth that, like a fast-spreading cancer, was choking off the other forms of life. Though the remaining four of North America's great chain of lakes--Superior, Michigan, Huron and Ontario--were less diseased, they too showed symptoms of serious, man-made illness.

The Cuyahoga River, emptying into Lake Erie, was so laden with oil and debris that it twice caught fire. Masses of dead alewives washed ashore in Lake Michigan, fouling beaches. Tangles of Cladophora, a smelly freshwater seaweed, clogged other beaches. Commercial fisheries, which had long flourished on the lakes, perhaps a bit too aggressively, began closing for lack of good fish and fear of DDT and mercury contamination.

Sports fishermen had largely given up on the lakes, as stocks of walleyed pike, lake trout and other game species disappeared.

The hulls of pleasure boats were discolored by discharges from the steel plants of Gary, Ind., the oil refineries of Hamilton, Ont., and the paper mills of Green Bay, Wis. Raw sewage was regularly added to the noxious brew. Said a 1970 joint U.S.-Canadian report: "Approximately one-third of the United States shoreline [on Lake Erie] is either continuously or intermittently fouled with bacterial contamination."

The growing pollution of the Great Lakes was not only an aesthetic and commercial tragedy. More than 29 million Americans and 9 million Canadians (more than a third of Canada's population) live in the Great Lakes basin. The lakes contain 95% of the U.S. supply of fresh water in lakes and reservoirs and 20% of the world's; they supply drinking water for 23.5 million Americans. Clearly, something had to be done.

It was. In the past decade, international commissions have been formed, endless stacks of reports written, legislation passed, bans enforced, and billions of dollars spent on facilities to clean the waste water that was being dumped into the lakes. As a result, even environmentalists are optimistic about the future of the waters. Says G. Keith Rogers, a scientist at the Canada Center for Inland Waters: "Previously people were saying 'How can we stop the lakes from getting worse?' Now we are seriously talking about rehabilitating the lakes to their original state."

Much of the easier, partly cosmetic work has been accomplished. The globs of oil, the multicolored industrial discharges, the flotsam from shoreline cities, the fecal and bacterial wastes are no longer dumped in the lakes in vast quantities. According to the International Joint Commission, the group overseeing the U.S.-Canadian agreements to clean up the waters, more than 600 of the 864 major dischargers into the Great Lakes now meet the tough new water-quality regulations. In the past ten years U.S. and Canadian municipalities have spent more than $5 billion to improve sewage treatment plants. Industries, often prod! ded by injunctions and fines, have spent billions more.

One of the most important omens for the future of the lakes is the sharp reduction in the amount of phosphorus dumped into them. A 1972 U.S.-Canadian agreement lowered the levels of phosphates that municipalities were allowed to dump into the water, and most towns along the shores and on rivers emptying into the lakes are well on their way toward meeting those requirements. The significant exception is the city of Detroit; it continues to dump three times the permissible levels into the Detroit River, which flows into the western end of Lake Erie. One of the largest sources of the harmful phosphates was common laundry detergent, but the levels have now been lowered by law in every state and province bordering the lakes except Ohio. The result has been not only the lessening of unsightly deposits of suds along rivers and beaches, but also a slowdown of eutrophication, the nutrient-induced aging process that eventually chokes lakes with algae and other plant growth.

Even contamination from DDT, which some scientists had predicted would take hundreds of years to be washed out of the Great Lakes, is only 10% of what it was ten years ago. Says Wayland Swain, director of the EPA's Large Lakes Research Laboratory in Grosse He, Mich.:

"Even in Lake Erie we now expect DDT to disappear completely in a rather short time. In fact, it is now difficult to find it anywhere in the lake except in the sediment."

Large game fish are making a comeback. Virtually wiped out by overfishing, pollution and the eellike sea lamprey (an ocean predator that apparently first migrated from the Hudson River into the lakes after man had opened the way with the Erie Canal, the native lake trout is again being pulled from the lakes by sports fishermen, who now can also catch coho and chinook salmon from the Pacific Ocean. Still, despite the fact that the waters are cleaner and the lamprey has been contained by a concerted attack on its breeding ground, the game fish population can be sustained only by frequent replanting. Says K.H. Loftus, of the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources: "The real criterion of the rebound of the lakes will be when the fish that were eliminated are back taking care of themselves.

That's the sign of a healthy lake, but it's yet to happen except in a few very isolated localities."

Toxic substances in the lakes are now the environmentalists' major concern The levels of such chemicals as mirex (an insecticide), PCBs and mercury are still too high to allow the resumption of commercial fishing, and Canada publishes a guide that warns sports fishermen which fish are unsafe to eat. Says Leila Botts, chairman of the Great Lakes Basin Commission

"As we learn more about the problems of he Great Lakes, we discover that it's not as easy as it first appeared when we assumed that if we'd just get industry and the municipalities to clean up their acts, we'd have clean water. Now we've largely done that, and we discover that there are dangerous toxic substances in the lakes we didn't even know about before."

Thus the problems of the Great Lakes are not solved because the beach at Storing State Park on Lake Erie is officially opened again for the first time since 1961, or because the Cuyahoga River, while gray and sulky looking, is relatively free from oil and jetsam, or because the water treatment plant in Chicago is having fewer taste and odor problems. Says EPA's Swain: "We still have a long way to go before we solve the problems of toxic substances. Then there is a whole series of new environmental issues." Among them: sodium from the salt used during the winter on Midwestern roads, which drains into the lakes and may be an important element in feeding the undesirable blue-green algae. Also, Congress is considering extending winter navigation on the lakes.

That would benefit the U.S. steel indus try and the economy of several ports. But environmentalists fear that disruption of the lakes' whiter ice cover would cause damage to fish and plant life. The energy crisis has made state governments less resistant to suggestions that gas and oil explorations-- with their potential for pollution-- be undertaken in the Great Lakes basin. (Canada already takes natural gas from Lake Erie.) These problems are not insoluble, but they will require a subtlety of technology and policy quite different from the massive input of dollars that cured many of the lakes' ills during the 1970s. "Basically I'm optimistic," says Robert Boden of the EPA's Great Lakes National Program Office. "We are reaching a state of finetuning of the Great Lakes ecosystem."

And that's definitely progress.

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