{"id":168271,"date":"2026-04-17T05:23:30","date_gmt":"2026-04-17T05:23:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/168271\/"},"modified":"2026-04-17T05:23:30","modified_gmt":"2026-04-17T05:23:30","slug":"cleaning-up-lake-erie-begins-with-a-network-of-digital-sensors-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/168271\/","title":{"rendered":"Cleaning Up Lake Erie Begins With A Network Of Digital Sensors"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The city of Cleveland sits on the banks of Lake Erie<\/a> at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River. In the 1960s, the Cuyahoga was so polluted with petroleum waste it actually caught fire! Randy Newman wrote a song about it for the movie Major League.<\/p>\n

Humans have some genetic defect that makes them believe they can dump all kinds of waste products into America\u2019s rivers, lakes, and oceans and there will be no consequences. The Supine Court tends to agree, having ruled on several occasions that regulating pollution of US waterways at the source is an example of government overreach that must be resisted with every fiber of our being. That suggests the supposedly smart people on the court are devoid of common sense and have no concept of how the natural world works. Think about that for a minute.<\/p>\n

Today, about 5.5 billion gallons of freshwater are drawn from the lake each day to meet industrial and consumer needs. While water quality on Lake Erie today has improved since the days of it being used as a large-scale industrial dumping ground for steel mills and chemical plants, it still struggles with poor water quality.<\/p>\n

The 2025 State of the Great Lakes report<\/a> released last month found that Lake Erie still ranks poorly for pollution caused by chemical runoff and is by far the biggest body of water to consistently rank in the top five of America\u2019s most-polluted lakes. Demand has grown partly because cites like Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo growing for the first time in more than 50 years, and partly because so many data centers that need water for cooling are being built in the region.<\/p>\n

In response, organizations in and around Cleveland and neighboring communities have agreed to create a platform to test technologies that measure and monitor water quality.<\/a> Hundreds of sensor buoys will observe and detect E coli, algal blooms, turbidity levels, and more than a dozen other water-related factors in collaboration with companies and researchers from around the world.<\/p>\n

\u201cSeveral years ago, our civic leaders were asking: \u2018Why aren\u2019t we doing more with water? It\u2019s our biggest natural asset.\u2019 We figured our biggest issue around water was [the lack of] water tech,\u201d Bryan Stubbs of the Cleveland Water Alliance, told The Guardian.<\/a> \u201cThis idea of test bedding became kind of the secret ingredient of what we\u2019ve done here.\u201d<\/p>\n

The effort will turn the lake into the largest digitally connected freshwater body of water in the world. The buoys give researchers real-time information on wave height and contaminant and pollution levels across 7,750 square miles both off-shore and on land.<\/p>\n

Microplastics Abatement<\/p>\n

At Case Western Reserve University, researchers have begun using new technologies to capture 90% of microplastics<\/a> down to 50 microns from washing machines, preventing them from being dumped into Lake Erie, which is particularly vulnerable to pollution because of its shallow depth and tendency to warm quickly in spring and summer. Other projects are recording solar radiation, dissolved oxygen levels, and water and air temperatures. Korean companies have come to the area to test electrochemical water treatment methods in Lake Erie\u2019s water.<\/p>\n

\u201cLake Erie is 2 percent of the Great Lakes\u2019 water but 50 percent of its diversity \u2026 because it\u2019s the shallowest,\u201d says Stubbs. \u201cAnd it\u2019s warming quicker each year.\u201d That warming is made worse by the more than 12 million residents and businesses \u2014 from farming and manufacturing to residential communities \u2014 in its watershed. Waste from all three sources regularly ends up in the lake. The western section of the lake is especially affected by runoff from agricultural in the form of phosphates that enter from the Maumee River.<\/p>\n

The challenges to cleaning up the lake are extensive. \u201cScientists and others say we need a 40 percent phosphorus reduction to minimize the blooms. About 90 percent coming into the western Lake Erie basin is from agricultural runoff,\u201d said Sandy Bihn of the Lake Erie Waterkeeper, who is based in Toledo, Ohio.<\/p>\n

Agricultural Runoff
\n\"\"Credit: 2025 State of the Great Lakes report<\/p>\n

While efforts to reduce the amount of commercial fertilizer have succeeded in reducing the amount of phosphorus going into Lake Erie, the amount of manure has grown in large part due to the increasing number of livestock operations in the area. \u201cWe\u2019re not getting anywhere. The manure problem is the core problem, the growing problem,\u201d Bihn said. The question that begs to be asked is why pig shit is allowed to be dumped into area waterways, but the Supine Court thinks doing so should be perfectly legal because, you know \u2014 government overreach!<\/p>\n

Privatizing Profits, Socializing Costs<\/p>\n

Farming isn\u2019t the only industry responsible for Lake Erie\u2019s pollution issues. Last year, Campbell\u2019s, the soup company, admitted to polluting the Maumee River more than 5,400 times from a local plant between 2019 and 2024. In nearby Toledo, city authorities have had to spend about $500 million on water treatment upgrades after severe algae blooms in 2014 made the region\u2019s lake water poisonous and forced hundreds of thousands of residents to go without water for three days. With the prevailing wind coming from the west, harmful algae blooms can be pushed east into other heavily populated areas such as metro Cleveland.<\/p>\n

Sharp-eyed readers will note that taxpayers pay to clean up industrial messes because heaven forefend that businesses should do so!<\/p>\n

In Avon Lake, a coastal town of about 27,000 people 20 miles west of Cleveland, administrators and the Cleveland Water Alliance have teamed up with a company in Korea to develop a system for making commercial-grade sodium hypochlorite, the active ingredient in chlorine bleach, on site. The pilot project is the first of its kind in North America and eliminates the need to ship hazardous chlorine gas on trucks and trains from across the region.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were looking at getting away from chlorine gas for disinfection, and we looked at on-site generation,\u201d says Rob Munro of the Avon Lake Regional Water, a utility with about a quarter of a million customers across northern Ohio. \u201cThe big thing for us is the safety standpoint, and there are supply chain problems [that are eliminated].\u201d<\/p>\n

The next challenge for Stubbs and others at the Alliance is to promote technologies for wintertime monitoring of aquatic life activity and behavioral changes as well as levels of water turbidity. Higher levels of cloudiness in lake water can promote the buildup of\u00a0 ice, which can block water intake pipes on the lake during the coldest times of the year. \u201cThe more buoys we have out there,\u201d says Stubbs, \u201cthe more data we can make available to let operators know what\u2019s happening given wind conditions [and] currents.\u201d<\/p>\n

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