Can you drink water from Lake Erie?

About one-third of the total population of the Great Lakes basin is in the Lake Erie watershed. Approximately twelve million people live in the watershed, including seventeen metropolitan areas with more than 50,000 residents. The lake provides drinking water for about eleven million of these inhabitants.



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Drinking Water - State of the Great Lakes. The 2012 Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement states that “the Waters of the Great Lakes should be a source of safe, high quality drinking water”. Approximately 8.5 million Canadians and 19.5 million Americans get their drinking water from the surface waters of the Great Lakes.

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The major sources of phosphorus reductions were phosphorus outputs at wastewater plant discharges; eliminating phosphorous from laundry detergent; and no-till farming practices. Because of the phosphorus reductions, our Lake became much more clear and clean.

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The average underwater visibility of Lake Superior is about 8 metres or 27 feet, making it the cleanest and clearest of the Great Lakes.

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In the deeper waters of Lake Erie's central basin, the process of decomposition depletes the oxygen in the bottom waters. When this oxygen-deficient water interacts with Erie's lakebed sediments and clay, heavy metals such as manganese and iron are released from the muck into the water.

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Dead Zones This stratification of lake water is due to the different densities of water with temperature change. The bacterial activity increases as dead algae and other materials settle to the bottom of the lake. Since the hypolimnion is much smaller than the upper layers, the oxygen can be depleted during the summer.

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While there have been past “sightings,” most have turned out to be pranks or misidentifications. The reality is that the largest of the Great Lakes (Lake Superior and Michigan) are extremely deep lakes that are too cold for sharks.

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The ocean, by far. The great lakes don't have waves, sets, currents or tides nearly as strong as the ocean. People drown in the Great Lakes every year because they underestimate the dangers. Some fall off a boat, some get caught in rip currents that pull a person away from shore.

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The pollution process was exacerbated by water flowing into the lake from various industrial cities. Detroit was home to factories that dumped acids, iron and oil wastes into the river that flowed into Lake Erie at its Western end. Runoffs from Cleveland farms carried wastes into the lake from its Southern end.

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Lake Erie is the shallowest and warmest of the Great Lakes.

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The opposite of Lake Superior in almost every way, Lake Ontario is the easternmost, lowest in elevation, smallest in surface area and perhaps the most polluted Great Lake.

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