It’s been a week since a significant leak at a long abandoned fertilizer plant in the Tampa Bay area threatened the surrounding groundwater, soil and local water supply.
Last weekend, officials ordered the evacuation of more than 300 families living near the 676-acre Piney Point plant in Manatee County. The sheriff even emptied his prison’s first floor of prisoners if a wall of 20 feet of water rolled toward their side.
Local officials said by Monday they think the crisis has been averted; they lifted evacuation orders Tuesday afternoon. But what they meant was that the impending disaster was postponed. The long-running, slow-moving crisis of toxicity, which has been in the making for decades, continues – and is reflected in dozens of radioactive dams across the state.
“We’re not here near the forest yet – there’s a long way to go,” said Glen Compton of ManaSota-88, a nonprofit environment that has been encouraging officials for decades to pile up industrial waste. to do. .
Ptony Point has a long history of polluting the water and air around it, and dates back to when the plant was built in 1966, Compton says. Only two years later, in 1968, Compton established ManaSota-88 to combat the site’s phosphate extraction. (“The 88 stood for 1988 because we were supposed to solve all the problems within 20 years,” says Compton. “The 88 now stands for 2088.”)
Within a year of Piney Point being built, the original owners – a subsidiary of Borden, the glue and milk company – were caught dumping garbage in nearby Bishop Harbor, a marine estuary flowing into Tampa Bay. The plant has changed owners back and forth over the years, while still causing numerous human health and environmental disasters and incidents.
In 1989, for example, a leak of 23,000 liters of sulfuric acid from a fish tank forced the evacuation of hundreds of people.
After the owner went bankrupt, the fertilizer plant in Piney Point was shut down in 2001. But the waste from more than three decades of phosphate mining still lies in massive heaps on the site – the environmental equivalent of a ticking time bomb. A severe storm can flood, for example.
Before phosphate can be used to grow crops in fertilizer, it goes through a chemical process that pollutes. Phosphate ores extracted from the soil are treated to create phosphoric acid – a major component of fertilizers. Phosphogypsum is the radioactive waste that remains. For every tonne of desired phosphoric acid produced for fertilizer, more than five tonnes of phosphogypsum waste remain.
The fertilizer industry that produces the waste then dumps it into large piles known as ‘gypstacks’ – hundreds of feet high and hundreds of acres wide. And at the top of these mountains are large lagoons, containing hundreds of millions of gallons of wastewater that are highly acidic and radioactive with heavy metal pollution. A breach of another pile in the state after a hurricane in 2004 resulted in millions of gallons of polluted water spilling into Tampa Bay.
This toxic industry has plagued the state for decades. Central Florida is the phosphate capital of the world; the state produces 80% of the phosphate mined in the US as well as 25% of the phosphate used around the world. An estimated 1 billion tons of phosphogypsum is housed in about two dozen stacks that line the Florida landscape, some as high as 200 feet, each with its own acidic wastewater on top. And every year about 30 million tons are added.
“Florida cannot ignore the catastrophic risks of phosphate extraction and its toxic waste products,” said Jaclyn Lopez, director of Florida at the Center for Biological Diversity. “No community needs to experience the consequences of this toxic legacy due to the short-term financial gain of some businesses.”
According to Compton, what’s happening in Piney Point sets a precedent in Florida for industrial waste from phosphate extraction. “Everything that could go wrong went wrong here,” he says.
According to the Florida Department of the Environment, approximately 223 million gallons remain in the leaking dam at Piney Point. So far, about 215 million gallons of wastewater has been pumped into Tampa Bay. Environmental lawyers fear how the poisonous stew of the plant could affect the water quality: the state agency said on Wednesday that there are increased levels of phosphorus where the wastewater is left.
Two additional stacks of wastewater control dams remain at Piney Point, and officials fear an unaddressed violation could lead to a sudden stream of water from the other two stacks, which is more toxic and acidic. If that happened, Compton says, “we would expect to see a huge impact on Bishop Harbor, one of the most beautiful places in the state of Florida.”
If one of these stacks fails, he adds, the port ‘will be completely destroyed. It really is not a too strong term to use. The nutrient-laden water can fuel algae blooms, which already endanger the vulnerable marine life.
At the end of Wednesday, with pumps still pumping out millions of gallons of wastewater, state senators approved an amendment that would allocate $ 3 million – which appears to be the first amount of money in a $ 200 million plan to close the site. and clean up – to throw away the waste water.
Compton says the plan involves building a well injection to get rid of the wastewater – an idea faced by opposition from surrounding residents, national organizations and anyone interested in agriculture in the area. ‘If you throw wastewater into the ground, you have no idea where it’s going. There is no 100% foolish way to monitor which direction the aquifer flows and where it ends up. ”
The Piney Point site is a costly environmental disaster, and Compton believes the fertilizer industry should be responsible for disposing of waste, rather than passing the cost on to taxpayers. But even with talks about cleaning and closing the fertilizer plant on the horizon, he is not optimistic, there is a danger that pollution by the wastewater will soon disappear.
“There’s a local saying that if you go to a Manatee provincial commission meeting 50 years from now, there will be two things on the agenda: sewage dumping and Piney Point,” Compton adds. “It’s not going to go away anytime soon.”