The simmering summer of 2010 is coughing up a sickly and unprecedented batch of toxic blue-green algae in western Lake Erie and nearly a dozen of Ohio’s shallow, inland lakes.

Many lake scientists are speculating that it’s only going to get worse.

“We’re going to see a greener and greener lake until changes are made,” said John Hageman of Stone Laboratory, Ohio State University’s water research station on Gibraltar Island in western Lake Erie. “Everything points to this just getting worse.”

That might be hard to imagine.

But it could help to survey the squalid situation at Grand Lake St. Mary’s — a large, inland lake in western Ohio. The 13,000-acre lake near Celina grabbed the attention of both the public and health officials all summer long because of its toxic, pea-soup waters and foamy surface.

“Grand Lake St. Mary’s has gone green every summer for decades, that’s not new,” said EPA spokeswoman Dina Pierce. “But this year, it just exploded — at times it looked like a science fiction landscape, almost turquoise or swimming pool blue with white foam on top.

“People who have lived there their whole lives had never seen anything like it.”

But while the Great Lake and the big lake near Celina have grabbed the headlines, in recent weeks it seems as if almost any shallow body of warmer water in Ohio might be at risk from being tainted by a floating, green bloom of algae.

Simply put, the 2010 algae outbreak is breaking the mold.

“This is first year we’ve seen blooms like this — all across the state,” said Jen House of the Ohio Department of Health, which is working with the EPA and state Department of Natural Resources to coordinate warnings at the various lakes and Lake Erie beaches. “The problem is that this bacteria loves warm, sunny weather and we’ve had plenty of that.”

State officials have posted warnings about the dangers of coming in contact with blue-green algae at sites from West Branch State Park in Portage County (later found to be free of blue-green algae) to East Harbor State Park on the shores of Lake Erie’s warm and shallow western basin.

Ohio health and recreation officials have received about 30 complaints linked to human sickness or irritation from exposure to algae — more than half from Grand Lake St. Mary’s, where officials have long known that runoff from animal feeding operations is providing nutrients for the algae to grow.

At least three dogs have also reportedly been killed by exposure to the blue-green algae in the Ohio lake. Those pet deaths followed similar algae-related dog deaths in recent years in Minnesota, Illinois and Indiana.

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