Originally published by VoteWater on October 30, 2025
According to a story in the June 16, 2021, Fort Myers News Press under the headline “$750,000 and six tons of algaecide later, toxin warning signs are still up along the Caloosahatchee in Olga,” cyanobacteria toxins at the W.P. Franklin Lock were so high Lee County’s health department was urging people and their pets to stay out of the water along the Caloosahatchee’s south shore.
And that’s despite the company consistently over-dosing the bloom with algaecide, according to John Cassani, who was Calusa Waterkeeper at the time and is now a VoteWater.org board member.
“I observed the (LakeGuard Oxy) application near Franklin Lock and Dam for 13 consecutive days and witnessed numerous label violations,” Cassani said.
According to that EPA-approved LakeGuard Oxy warning label: “When a single application dose is below 30 lbs./acre, minimum retreatment interval is 12 hours. When a single application dose is between 30-98 lbs./acre, minimum retreatment interval is 24 hours. When a single application dose exceeds 98 lbs./acre, the minimum retreatment interval is 48 hours.”
BlueGreen Water Technologies reported that the “average dosage rate over the 15-day project was about 40 lb./acre,” so the minimum treatment interval should have been 24 hours.
Cassani told VoteWater: “I have a lingering memory that (the BlueGreen Water Technologies crew) had to keep reapplying and reapplying (the algaecide). They did more than one application per day for many of those days as the bloom persisted. They had to keep reapplying, more often than the label allowed.”
Cassani said he contacted the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Affairs, which he said cited the BlueGreen Water Technologies crew for not wearing proper personal protection devices, “but they didn’t go any further, they couldn’t answer my questions about the applications, because they said they couldn’t get the information they needed.”
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