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The night before Toledo officials warned people not to drink the municipal tap water, Jeff Reutter opened a federal website to check on the algae bloom in western Lake Erie.

The picture didn’t look bad, at first, to Reutter, an expert on toxic algae who is the director of the Ohio Sea Grant College Program. The algae covered Maumee Bay, but the bloom was significantly smaller than the one in 2011 that stretched past Cleveland, ruining summer beach trips for families along the Lake Erie coast.

A closer look gave Reutter pause, though. The most-intense parts of the bloom seemed to have settled right at the mouth of the Maumee River.

Related story: Water still not safe to drink in Toledo

“It’s at the greatest concentration right in Maumee Bay,” Reutter said yesterday. “And, unfortunately, that’s where the Toledo water intake is” for the city’s Collins Park Water Treatment Plant.

Early Saturday morning, Toledo officials confirmed Reutter’s fears. Tests at the plant showed levels of the toxin microcystin in Toledo’s drinking water that were above the 1 part per billion that the World Health Organization deems is safe to drink.

Boiling water concentrates that toxin, so a simple boil alert wasn’t an option.

By 2 a.m. Saturday, Toledo had issued a warning that ultimately affected more than 500,000 people: Don’t drink water from the taps. Don’t even cook with it.

Microcystin can cause nerve and liver damage in people and animals. Symptoms can include diarrhea, vomiting, cramping and dizziness.

It was the second time that algae toxins had contaminated a public drinking-water system in Ohio. In September, about 2,000 people served by a water-treatment plant in Ottawa County, in northwestern Ohio, were without safe tap water for drinking or cooking for two days.

Reutter said the bloom over Maumee Bay now is “exactly the same situation” as the bloom that polluted water in Ottawa County last year. The wind patterns have kept it concentrated near where Toledo collects its water rather than spreading it throughout Lake Erie.

“There’s no problem over at Marblehead or any of the islands or Cedar Point or Cleveland,” Reutter said. “But the Toledo area is really getting the full brunt of this right now.”

Adults affected by the warning still can use the water for bathing. The World Health Organization allows up to 20 parts of microcystin per billion parts of water for bathing. Tests at the Toledo plant showed water there had levels as high as 2.5 parts per billion.

George Zonders, a spokesman for Columbus’ public utilities, said it is unlikely that toxic algae could shut down the drinking-water supply here because Columbus gets its water from more than one source. The city is installing a $70 million treatment system in 2016 that will, in part, help deal with algae toxins.

Municipalities treat algae toxins with carbon. The toxins latch on to the carbon, and the combined particles are then removed from the water.

Algae flourish in warm, shallow waters, which makes Lake Erie — the shallowest of the Great Lakes — an inviting home. The algae feed on phosphorus, a key component of the fertilizers farmers spread over fields.

Studies at the National Center for Water Quality Research at Heidelberg University in Tiffin have found a direct link between farming and high levels of phosphorus in watersheds, Laura Johnson, a research scientist there, said yesterday.

“We know it’s coming from agricultural runoff. But in reality, when we think about why these farms are leaking phosphorus, that part of the story is far from clear and far from simple,” Johnson said.

Heavy rains can wash fertilizers from fields into the streams and rivers that feed lakes. Overflowing sewers, failed septic systems and runoff from lawn fertilizers also contribute to phosphorus in the watershed.

Ohio has no laws requiring farmers to limit the amount of phosphorus on their fields or that force farmers to reduce runoff. But lawmakers this past spring took a step toward tackling the algae problem when they offered farmers voluntary training before they use commercial fertilizers on their fields.

As residents of Lucas, Fulton and Wood counties in northwestern Ohio and Monroe County in Michigan tried to find clean water for their families over the weekend, the Ohio Environmental Council and the Alliance for the Great Lakes both called for increased regulation of agricultural and sewage runoff.

“We think there should be a minimum set of best practices that agricultural producers should follow,” said Adam Rissien, director of agricultural and water policy for the Ohio Environmental Council. “It’s not really fair to put the burden of controlling all of the runoff on the producers who voluntarily do the right thing.”

Algae blooms have hurt tourism and cost taxpayers millions of dollars.

Toxic algae have led to warnings about swimming and fishing at Grand Lake St. Marys in western Ohio and Buckeye Lake in Fairfield, Licking and Perry counties. The city of Columbus spent nearly $800,000 getting rid of the rotten taste and smell in drinking water caused by nontoxic algae in Hoover Reservoir last winter. Toledo spent $3 million last summer keeping toxic algae out of the drinking-water supply there.

Algae toxins are different from E. coli bacteria, which also has contaminated Buckeye Lake and Lake Erie beaches. Some strains of E. coli can cause severe abdominal cramps, bloody diarrhea and vomiting, but not the liver and neurological damage of microcystin.

Reutter said scientists and public water and health officials are concerned because the algae bloom in Maumee Bay is likely to spread on Lake Erie. Algae problems typically get worse in September and October when the water is warmer than in the spring.

Reutter said he didn’t know if Ohio legislators should force farmers to change their ways.

“As much as anything, that is a question for society and for politicians,” he said. “The question really becomes, ‘How long should we wait for voluntary practices to work?’?”