Editor's note:
This is part of an ongoing series about people in Akron and Summit County with interesting jobs. Know someone who fits the bill? Email Culture & Arts Reporter Brittany Moseley at brittany@signalakron.org.
Tucked into a densely wooded area west of Lake Rockwell sits Mike Toth’s favorite tree.
As he stepped out of his truck, he apologized for the swarm of deer flies buzzing around. The area isn’t accessible to the public. Here, wild turkeys, deer and the ever-annoying fly reign — not people.
The tree is an American chestnut. When the City of Akron began purchasing land around the Cuyahoga River more than 100 years ago, coming across an American chestnut tree wouldn’t have been such a rare occurrence.
“It might seem a little underwhelming, but almost all of these were wiped out, billions and billions and billions of them by a blight 100 years ago,” Toth said. “This was a huge, important tree in the eastern United States. They only seem to exist in really nice, high quality places where the blight hasn’t come in yet.”
He continued, “It’s not going to make it forever. The blight will eventually get it. But to be able to see an American chestnut tree of this size, it’s pretty special.”
Ensuring safe drinking water for Akron
Officially, Toth is a water protection specialist for the Akron Water Supply Bureau. Unofficially, he is a self-described “wetland and botany nerd.”
He is part of a small team that monitors and protects the Upper Cuyahoga River Watershed in order to ensure safe drinking water for people in and around Akron. The watershed spans almost 20,000 acres, the majority of it in Portage and Geauga counties. It’s Toth’s job to know the area well. A good watershed means good water.
“I don’t think most Akron residents know that this is here,” Toth said as he drove through a section of the watershed. “I think most people are surprised when they see an Akron truck up in northern Geauga County, up in Middlefield. They don’t know what we’re doing up there. And we have to explain to them, this is our water supply. This is the Cuyahoga River. This feeds all of Akron and 300,000 people, way far downstream where no one’s thinking about [it].”
Toth’s job looks different each day. It’s one of the things he likes best about his work. On the day Signal Akron met up with him, Toth and two colleagues took a boat out on Lake Rockwell for water sampling. Unlike much of the watershed, Lake Rockwell isn’t open to the public. That’s because it serves as Akron’s main source of drinking water.
Keeping an eye on algae at Lake Rockwell
The lake was calm and quiet as Charles Lacy, a lab analyst, dropped a data sonde into the water. The device records a host of information including temperature, chlorophyll levels, conductivity and pH. Spread throughout the lake are buoys that sample and make digital recordings of the water as well.
As Lacy read the numbers from the device, fellow lab analyst Robert Holmes recorded the results on paper. The data sonde keeps a digital record, but Holmes said they “like to do that stuff manually.”
“We’ll take it back to the plant and we’ll put it in the computer, and we’ll make graphs of it to track it over time,” he explained.
The main priority with Lake Rockwell is monitoring its algae levels. The goal, Toth explained, is to manage the watershed upstream of the lake in order to mitigate the amount of harmful nutrients that reach it. (Phosphorus and nitrogen, the main suspects, are found in fertilizers.) When nutrient levels are high, Toth and his crew deploy algaecide to the lake from the boat, aptly named Al G Hunter.
Toth spends a lot of time on the water, sampling sites throughout the watershed. Some instances, like testing the lake for nutrient levels twice a month, happen like clockwork. Other instances of water sampling cannot be planned for, like a car careening into Lake Rockwell or manure being dumped upstream or 20,000 gallons of milk spilling into the river.
“It was a cheese processing facility, and one of their silos collapsed.” Toth recalled. “Cheese will make the river do weird stuff.”
Walking the Akron watershed
Toth also spends a fair amount of time on land, especially during the colder months. Walking the watershed’s property lines can take all winter, he said.
“What we’re looking for are encroachments. So with that many acres, we have a lot of neighbors. Almost all of our neighbors are wonderful, and they keep us informed of what’s going on. But we have some troublemakers too, and I’m often the one getting sent up to talk to them,” Toth said.
One spot with a few neighbors is an area bordering Eckert Ditch, a tributary on Dawley Road east of Lake Rockwell. The area was home to a small trailer park, a failing septic system and oil and gas wells. It was one of the main sources of bad nutrients in the lake, Toth said.
“Eckert Ditch had been completely channelized, and so water was just rushing through there, like a shotgun,” he said. “There was no sinuosity, no curvature in the river at all.”
In 2018, the watershed division purchased the land through an EPA grant and embarked on a major restoration project.
Today, the area is rich with native plants and some very vocal bullfrogs. As he walked down Dawley Road, Toth identified some plants: swamp rose, duck weed, hibiscus, bur-reed.
To some, the area may look like a scrubby, overgrown wetland. But to Toth, it’s gorgeous.
“It’s exactly what I would love to see here,” he said. “We want this to be woods eventually. And it’s doing just that, so I think this looks fantastic.”