What do we do next?
Is Marion County now to be known as the home of dangerous water? Or should it more properly be known as one of the few places in the United States so concerned about public health that it was willing to confront a serious peril that others ignored?
Despite actions by Canada, Australia, and the World Health Organization, the United States has dragged its feet in dealing with the threat posed by toxins in anabaena algae.
Anabaena isn't in Marion Reservoir alone.
It's all over the place — a byproduct of a weak agricultural market that encourages farmers to overuse chemicals in wrongheaded hopes of increasing yields.
It just isn't reported as thoroughly elsewhere as it has been here.
That doesn't mean it's safe. It's just means others have not been as courageous as Marion County officials have been.
The question now becomes what to do about it.
First, the federal Environmental Protection Agency and the Kansas Department of Health and Environment must enact rigorously researched limits, like those in other parts of the world, to permanently protect us against this peril.
Second, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers must take steps to treat Marion Reservoir, and other reservoirs where similar threats are now being noticed, to ensure the safety of wildlife and humans who come in contact with the water.
Finally, state and federal grants must be made available to local water plants to install state-of-the-art equipment, such as carbon filters, necessary to remove any contaminants that remain.
In Marion County, Hillsboro, with a newer water facility, has been able to do this at considerable, through still relatively modest, cost.
Marion, with an older facility, is in danger of having no option but to turn its back on the problem and solve its questions of water quality not by fixing the water but rather by shopping for it a la carte from among multiple water sources.
While that is a prudent short-term solution in Marion, the longer- term solution is a new waterworks.
The same state and federal agencies that have dragged their feet since 1998, when the dangers of anabaena first came to their attention, now need to pony up money to resolve a problem that they allowed to reach crisis proportions.
— ERIC MEYER
