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As crews scramble to plug the leak in a toxic Florida sewage tank, local environmental activists whom politicians have long despised say the state is witnessing a historic failure decades of environmental disasters foretold .
Although the Florida Department of Environmental Protection said Monday night that fears of a second leak in the Piney Point Reservoir were unfounded, the body of water about 40 miles south of Tampa , full of toxic waste and fertilizer runoff, remains on the brink of collapse. If a full breach occurs, the Manatee County area could experience “catastrophic flooding,” Governor Ron DeSantis warned on Sunday.
Crews continue to pump sewage out of the leaking tank, but their job might be too little too late. Over the weekend, residents of more than 300 homes in the area of possible flooding were ordered to evacuate. If the reservoir, filled with waste from a now-defunct phosphate plant, suffers a total breach, 600 million gallons of water could gush out of the retention pond within minutes, county officials said.
Conservationists in the Tampa Bay area say they knew a crisis like this was coming and are worried about its potential short- and long-term effects.
Glenn Compton, founder of Florida-based environmental nonprofit ManaSota-88, has been monitoring Piney Point closely since 1968, just two years after mining of phosphate for fertilizers began on the site.
“It has been one catastrophic crisis event after another,” he said of the reservoir. “Anything that could go wrong has gone wrong.”
The Piney Point reservoir sits above a phosphogypsum stack, often referred to as a “gypsum stack,” which is a massive repository containing the waste by-products of the phosphate fertilizer industry. Many are built to stand over 200 feet tall and are topped with tanks meant to capture rainwater.
“When the drywall piles are so big and it’s raining, you don’t want the rainwater going through the chimney and leaking,” Compton said. The Piney Point reservoir, in theory, was intended to capture rainwater and prevent further contamination.
This would be the case, he said, if the tank had not been plagued by a “series of failures.”
In 2006, he said, one of the ponds was drained. In its place, site managers put dredged material from Port Manatee, a nearby seaport. “This pile was never designed to contain dredged material,” he said.
When the plastic coating that retains water tore in 2011, “millions of gallons of untreated sewage drained from the site,” he said, polluting nearby ports and devastating ecosystems fragile.
But this leak did not spark enough change to prevent further disasters.
Now the tank is already leaking, and the risk is serious, he warned.
“There is no better scenario here,” said Compton, who believes the current leak could have been avoided.
In the worst-case scenario, slicks of water would end up in the bay and subsequently devastate the region’s environment and economy, said Justin Bloom, a local lawyer and founder of Suncoast Waterkeeper, a non-profit organization. profit who works to protect and restore the waterways in west-central Florida.
“The main reason many people move and live here is to be by the ocean and around Tampa Bay,” he said. A total violation would be imminently dangerous, and in the long term could wipe out fishing, tourism and degrade property values.
Bloom said Piney Point had a “long and sordid history” and described it as a “threat that the community has faced for many years”.
“There has been a failure to adequately regulate this facility and the phosphate industry in general by local, state and federal governments,” he said.
Bloom and others say the phosphate fertilizer industry pollutes “from cradle to grave”: mines pollute and gypsum chimneys do too.
Even if a breach is avoided, damage is already occurring. Officials are trying to pump water from the leaking tank, but that water has to go somewhere.
“Where are they going to put the water?” asked Sarah Hollenhurst, an environmental activist from the area.
She suspects the water will end up in the streams and bay, creating the dreaded red tides or algae blooms that are already plaguing the area. This happens when the runoff feeds the growth of algae which sucks oxygen from the water as it dies and results in the death of fish.
Hollenhurst is also concerned about possible contamination of the aquifer, which could affect the water supply. With over two dozen drywall piles in Florida, she suspects more incidents like this will occur.
“These disasters will continue as long as phosphate mining does,” she said.
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