Bay City— The fun stops here, literally.
Bay City State Recreation Area features a one-mile beach that runs south from its visitors center along Lake Huron’s western shore. In reality, you can enjoy about 500 feet of it. Just south of the park’s volleyball courts, the white sands turn into what locals call “beach muck” — a thick layer of washed-up algal growth and detritus that sucks at visitors’ feet and makes the area close to impassable.
Nearby, Saginaw resident Chuck Arends, 48, and his son, Brandon, 14, do their fishing at the park’s lagoon, where a wooden pier allows them to avoid walking around in the sticky stuff.
“I was down here last year, and (the algae) wasn’t nearly as bad as it is this year,” Arends said.
Bay City is hardly the only place where algae has become part of summer life. But it does lie in one of the Great Lakes’ hot spots for algal growth — the Saginaw Bay. There, as well as in western Lake Erie and the Green Bay area of Lake Michigan, the green stuff has gone from being an occasional nuisance to an annual problem over the past decade.
In each of these areas, the trigger is phosphorus. It gets carried off the region’s yards, farms and golf courses by storm runoff and moves via streams and rivers to the lakes. It settles on the bottom of the lake bed and, in shallow waters, reacts to penetrating sunlight by generating algae.
And aesthetics and sticky beaches aren’t the only problem in Bay City. Residents on the city’s water system started noticing changes in their tap water last month.
“People were complaining about taste issues and odor issues,” said Dana Muscott, Bay City’s deputy city manager. “A couple of people called in saying the odor was swampy and that the taste was off. It just didn’t taste good.”
Officials with the city’s water treatment plant attributed the issues to algae in the bay where the intake pipe is and high temperatures over a prolonged part of July. To combat the problem, crews have flushed the distribution system in areas where complaints have been filed and there is additional treatment of the water. Despite the smell and taste issues, Muscott said the algae pose no health risks.
The muck is created by a kind of algae called cladophora, which is nontoxic. It can, however, pick up harmful bacteria such as E. coli. As such, the health departments of both Bay and Huron counties have issued warnings.
“Until the exact nature of the debris (muck) that is causing concern is identified, persons should limit their contact with the debris and wash with soap and water if in contact. …,” the warning states. “People with open sores and wounds and anyone that may ingest the material should avoid the ‘muck’ areas altogether.”
That won’t solve the problems with accessing the beach and Lake Huron through the muck. To give visitors a chance to cool off, the Department of Natural Resources is building a water spray area this summer and hopes to expand it next year.
“You can’t always enjoy the beach and lake because of the muck,” said Ron Olson, chief of the DNR’s recreation division. “Even out in the water, the muck is there under the surface.”
Roughly 120 miles south, dry weather conditions in the first half of the summer helped keep the annual algae blooms in check. That respite is over, according to researchers.
“The bloom this year got a little bit of a later start than in the previous couple of summers,” said Thomas Bridgeman, a professor of limnology at the University of Toledo’s Lake Erie Center. “But it seems to be coming on now.”
Bridgeman and others have studied the growth of algae in Lake Erie and said it moved from being a problem that cropped up every few years to an annual issue in the late 1990s. Some of the main sources of that phosphorus remain largely unchecked — large livestock farm operations and storm water runoff.
So don’t expect any changes on the lakes any time soon, Bridgeman said.
“This will continue to happen every year unless we do something different,” he said. “Unless we start changing the way we treat our watersheds, this is going to be an annual part of summer.”
In the 1960s and early 1970s, algae was a recurring issue in the Great Lakes. Efforts to reduce the amount of phosphorus getting into the waters were effective in getting rid of the blooms each year. But they began returning in the mid-to-late 1990s in each of the lakes, excluding Superior.
What happened?
“The conclusion we’ve come to is that invasive species — zebra and quagga mussels — have really cleared up the water as filter feeders,” said Harvey Bootsma, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s School of Freshwater Sciences. Clearer waters allow sunlight to penetrate to deeper lake depths.
In addition, the mussels feed on phosphorus floating in the water and secrete it in a more concentrated form that settles on the bottom.
Some relief might be on the way in the form of new regulations for Michigan property owners that kick in next year. Starting Jan. 1, it will be illegal to apply fertilizer that contains phosphorus to residential and commercial lawns.
But the new laws exempt applications for agriculture, new turf establishment and golf courses. And experts believe it might be necessary to target such large sources of phosphorus to eventually affect the algae growth.
“Up to now, the solutions have always been reduce phosphorus and it will reduce the algae,” Bootsma said. “The problem is we’ve met the goals we set decades ago, but the target has moved on us.”