Water Hazard

I’ll never forget the knot in my stomach when I read the news. It could have been my son. Anyone’s son. I was only a year into my stint as executive director for Milwaukee Riverkeeper and was doing my best to reincarnate as a “water person” after spending a dozen years as a scientist for The Nature Conservancy. In those years, water was important to my job, but never center stage. Now that I was supposedly a “water person”, I needed to know how could it be that pondwater had killed a healthy, athletic seventeen-year-old? We each have no choice but to play the hand we’re dealt, but since when did the deck of cards include death-by-algae?

Dane Rogers, the freckled captain of his school’s soccer team and a member of the National Honor Society, was the archetypal wholesome American son that parents dream of. It was as if he walked straight out of Disney’s central casting for “perfect sons”. The world was his, ripe with possibility, until a summer swim doused those dreams as swiftly and completely as a guillotine’s blade.

Looking to cool off on a 97-degree July day, Dan and four friends did what any sweaty, fun-loving Wisconsin kids would do. They went searching for water, even if it was just a golf-course pond. Undeterred by the fence between them and the fairways, they escaped the heat with a grand evening of horsing around in the water. Two nights later, Dane went into a series of seizures and collapsed. Paramedics could not revive him and within hours he was dead. Of Dane’s four companions from that sweltering evening, three experienced mild symptoms, but the remaining one, who, like Dane, had fully submerged on that hot day, came down with severe diarrhea and abdominal pain. He, however, survived.

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Because the illnesses didn’t surface until a full two days after playing in the pond, it wasn’t immediately clear that Dane encountered his mysterious assailant in the water. Instead, the coroner first explored a number of dead-end searches as he looked for causes of this young athlete’s death. Drugs, congenital heart defects, food poisoning, and pesticide exposure were all ruled out. It wasn’t until Dr. Stephen Carpenter, an internationally respected limnologist - i.e. someone who studies lakes - from the nearby University of Wisconsin read of Dane’s tragedy in the Madison newspaper and recognized a familiar pattern. Over the last decades epidemiologists had been tracking an increasing number of cases in which dogs – mostly water-loving retrievers – had died from swimming in cyanobacteria-infested waters. The blue-green bacteria - popularly referred to as blue-green algae though they aren’t actually algae – produce poisons, “cyanotoxins”, that cause a distinct suite of neurological and intestinal symptoms that sometimes lead to death. These were the same symptoms that killed Dane Rogers and sickened his four friends.

Dr. Carpenter emailed the coroner to share his hunch. The medical literature had no examples of a human killed by cyanobacterial toxins, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t happen.

It seemed far-fetched, but by this point the coroner was running out of hypotheses. Dane was long gone, but the hospital had collected samples of its patient’s blood and stool, allowing the coroner to run new tests on them. A year would go by before the answer was in, but the evidence was clear. Anabaena, a particular species of cyanobacteria, and anatoxin, the poison it produces, were found Dane’s samples as well as those from the sickest of his four friends. Dane earned the posthumous title of being the country’s first known human to be killed by freshwater toxic algae.

As Dr. Carpenter and others who study water quality knew, cyanobacteria naturally occur in low, background levels in freshwater throughout the world without causing any problems. In fact, they perform the essential job of converting gaseous nitrogen into compounds that plants can use. In other words, they are natural fertilizer factories. But under certain conditions – i.e. warm, nutrient-rich waters - the bacteria move into overdrive, replicating quickly and often releasing powerful neurotoxins. From the cyanobacteria’s vantage, the toxins perform the useful function of inhibiting the growth of competitors and keeping microscopic predators at bay. But for warm-blooded animals, like dogs, cattle, and now humans, who ingest water from a polluted farm or golf course pond – or dare I say, golf course water “hazard” - they can be deadly. Thanks to the sleuthing that answered the questions surrounding Dane’s untimely death, countless others have been saved. And maybe, just maybe, some ponds have been cleaned up.

After reading my last post, The Problem With Nitrates, reader Therese Gripentrog replied that she’s joined the Isaac Walton League’s Nitrate Watch. I found the link and signed up to volunteer along with her and hundreds of others and anticipate my kit to come in the mail any day now. Whether or not you can volunteer, check out the map – you’ll be able to see whether there are any volunteers near you and what they’re finding.

Also, a shout out to Daniel Rothberg for highlighting Keith Wilkinson’s piece on data centers, The Cloud Drinks Local. Rothberg quoted the same excerpt that I’m going to post here. If you feel like you can’t get ahead of the data center steam roller, you’re not imagining things. It’s the most real explanation I’ve seen of the permitting imbalance:

“[This example] illustrates what I call the infrastructure timing gap; our world now runs on two fundamentally different clocks. A data center can go from site selection to full operation in 18 to 36 months. The water treatment upgrades and reuse networks they depend on take 5 to 10 years to plan, fund, and build. The transmission lines that carry their power can take 7 to 15 years. The math simply doesn't add up.”