Thanks for pointing that out. Certainly not good and certainly not acceptable. But a little facts and a little math are useful for perspective. The same WTOL 11 also reported tonight that Toledo contributes less than 10% of the phosphorus to the lake. If you Google Toledo Waterways Initiative you will see that the users of Toledo sewer systems are right now paying $500 million in increased rates for upgrades that are under construction right now to eliminate that discharge. Again, not saying overflow is right, just that the good thing is it is in process of being eliminated (as it should be) and at great cost to people of Toledo.

Here is another interesting number. The Maumee river was flowing at 94,000 cubic feet per second all of Sunday and half of Monday(google usgs maumee gage). (Right now it is down to "only" 60,000 cfs flow). At 7.5 gal in each cubic feet, and at that 94,000 flow, in one minute 42,411,600 gallons of river water flows past Toledo into the lake (think 42 million gallon milk jugs!) At that flow rate, all of that 377M gallon combined sewer overflow from Toledo would equal a whooping 8.9 minutes of river flow (377,000,000 gal/42,411,600 gal). Divide 8.9 minutes into the 36 hours that the river ran at that 94,000 rate Sunday and part of Mon and the Toledo overflow accounted for .004 of the flow into the lake. It is much less than that when you consider that the river will run at 40-60,000 cubic feet per second for days and days yet! Again, yes it should be zero. But even big numbers are all relative.