While crew members try to stop the leak in a toxic wastewater reservoir in Florida, local environmental activists for whom politicians have long insulted say the state is witnessing a historic failure that predicts decades of environmental disasters.
Although Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection said Monday night that fears of a second leak in the Piney Point reservoir are unfounded, the water mass remains about 40 miles south of Tampa full of toxic debris and fertilizer runoff on the verge of collapse. If a total violation occurs, the area in Manatee County could see a “catastrophic flood,” Governor Ron DeSantis warned Sunday.
Crew continue to pump wastewater from the leaking reservoir, but their work may be too little too late. This past weekend, people in more than 300 homes located in the potential flood zone were ordered to evacuate. Provincial officials said the reservoir, full of waste from a phosphate plant that has now disappeared, is experiencing a total breach. It can flow 600 million liters of water out of the retention pool within minutes.
Environmental advocates in the Tampa Bay area say they know a crisis like this would come, and they are worried about the possible consequences for the short and long term.
Glenn Compton, founder of the Florida-based environmental advisory organization ManaSota-88, has been keeping a close eye on Piney Point since 1968, just two years after phosphate fertilizer mining began on site.
“It was one catastrophic crisis event after another,” he said of the reservoir. “Everything that can go wrong has gone wrong.”
Piney Point Reservoir is above a phosphate gypsum pile, often called a ‘gypsum pile’, which is a massive repository containing the waste products of the phosphate fertilizer industry. Many are built to be more than 200 feet high, and on top of that there are reservoirs meant to catch rainwater.
“If plaster piles are so big and it’s raining, you don’t want the rainwater going through the pile and leaking,” Compton said. Piney Point Reservoir was in theory intended to capture the rainwater and prevent further pollution.
That would be the case, he said, if the reservoir had not been plagued by a ‘series of failures’.
According to him, one of the dams was drained in 2006. In its place, the managers of the site placed dredging material from Port Manatee, a nearby seaport. “The stack was never intended to contain dredging material,” he said.
When the plastic liner that tore the water in 2011 ‘drained millions of gallons of untreated wastewater from the site’, he said, polluting nearby ports and destroying fragile ecosystems.
But the leak did not provoke enough changes to prevent further disasters.
The reservoir is already leaking, and the risk is great, he warned.
“There is no best-case scenario here,” said Compton, who believes the current leak could have been prevented.
In the worst case, skins of water would end up in the bay and then destroy the environment and economy, says Justin Bloom, a local lawyer and the founder of Suncoast Waterkeeper, a non-profit organization that works to protect and repair waterways in the country. west-central Florida.
“The main reason why many people move here and live here is to be by the sea and around Tampa Bay,” he said. A total breach would be dangerous at the moment, and in the long run could wipe out fisheries, tourism and diminish property values.
Bloom said Piney Point had a “long and bad history” and described it as a “threat the community has been dealing with for years.”
“The local, state and federal governments have failed to adequately regulate this facility and the phosphate industry in general,” he said.
Bloom and others say the phosphate fertilizer industry is polluting from “cradle to grave”: polluting the mine and gypsum piles as well.
Even if a violation is prevented, there is already damage going on. Officials are pumping water out of the leaking reservoir, but the water has to go somewhere.
“Where are they going to put the water?” asks Sarah Hollenhurst, an environmental activist in the area.
She suspects that the water will end up in the rivers and the bay, which will create the dreaded red tides or algae blooms that are already plaguing the area. This happens when runoff fuels algae that suck the oxygen out of the water when it dies and lead to fish killings.
Hollenhurst is also concerned about possible contamination of aquifers, which could affect the water supply. With more than two dozen cigarettes in Florida, she suspects more incidents like this will occur.
“These disasters will continue as long as phosphate extraction does,” she said.