The lake beside the apartment complex, the pond outside the office campus, the little lagoon that welcomes visitors to a gated community—all these water features can provide tremendous value to their respective properties. However, with improper drainage or negligent maintenance, these sparkling bodies of water can find themselves overrun with a sickly green, red, or brown layer of algae. Whether residential, commercial, or even industrial, learn why property managers should prevent algal blooms on the small bodies of water they oversee.
Appearances Matter
We’ll start with the self-evident: you should keep algal blooms from developing because they simply look bad. Humans are practically hard-wired to stay away from stagnant water, and a body of water hosting a colony of algae looks icky. A lake that can’t reflect the sun because it’s covered by slime? Your property will plummet in visitors’ estimation.
Unhealthy for Humans
Harmful algal blooms don’t just look bad—they smell bad, too. The distinctive “lake stink” that arises from colonies of algae can be just as unpleasant to passersby as their appearance. Worse still, exposure to this rampant growth can be a liability for property owners and managers. Environmental allergies to harmful algal blooms can leave the afflicted with nausea, fever, and other flu-like symptoms. A major part of why property managers should prevent algal blooms is avoiding any legal exposure.
Consider the Fish, Too
Ecosystems are delicate—especially aquatic ones. An onslaught of algae can choke out the rest of a pond’s life by blocking photosynthesis, depleting oxygen, and filling the water with toxins from decomposition. If you allow an algal bloom to run rampant, it can be too late for fish, plants, and other living things. Make sure to hire professionals who can skim this sludge from the surface and also prevent it from continuing to happen.
A Sign of Bigger Problems
Algal blooms don’t just manifest out of nowhere. It takes a certain set of circumstances to catalyze these coatings of unsightly muck. Quite often, it’s fertilizer runoff that makes its way into the water, where high phosphorus content provides an unintentionally fertile breeding ground for cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, along with the “true” eukaryotic forms of algae. Improper waste disposal has harmful environmental ramifications, and good stewardship of our land is becoming more important than ever.
