Up until a few years ago, Austinites didn’t much worry about poisonous blue-green algae sickening them and killing their dogs. Then in 2018, flooding upstream of Austin sent massive amounts of runoff down the Colorado River and into area lakes.
That runoff contained agricultural and residential fertilizers, septic waste and other things that injected a supercharged dose of phosphorus into the water.
Read more from Mose Buchele with Texas Public Radio here.