Residents near Piney Point can return home as evacuation orders lifted
The threat of a former phosphate processing plant’s largest retention pond collapsing, sending about 300 million gallons of contaminated water rushing into surrounding areas, has diminished enough to allow residents to return home and the roads to reopen.
Evacuation orders were lifted late Tuesday afternoon, allowing all residents, including the 137 people and their pets being sheltered in local hotels, to return home immediately, Manatee County Public Safety Director Jacob said.
“I am so pleased that the interruption to life as usual in North Manatee is minimal and that our residents and business owners can return safely tonight,” County Commission Chairwoman Vanessa Baugh said.
Florida Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried toured the site and said things appear to have stabilized.
“It seems like this is under control, as much as something like this could be under control,” Fried said.
Acting Manatee County Administrator Scott Hopes announced the immediate reopening of U.S. 41 during an update to the County Board of Commissioners on Tuesday morning. Road closures will be limited to along Buckeye Road.
A breach of the southeast wall of the largest of Piney Point’s three retention ponds was discovered on Friday. Those ponds sit above a lined stack of phosphogypsum, another byproduct of phosphate processing, and form the highest points in Manatee County.
As of Tuesday morning, 26 pumps and 10 vacuum trucks worked to lower the level of water in the pond to prevent a full breach, releasing about 23,500 gallons of water per minute.
A second uncontrolled release of water spilling about 70,000 gallons a day north into Piney Point Creek, which connects through Cockroach Bay to Tampa Bay, stopped on Monday.
An engineering team from the Florida Division of Emergency Management, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, the Southwest Florida Water Management District and the Army Corps of Engineers determined on Monday that the site was safe enough for workers to be on the site. On Tuesday, that team is working to determine if the berm is safe and what the current threat is of inundation.
“We will most likely be able to report that we’re moving out of that critical stage of a full breach and moving into something more contained,” Hopes said. “The risk level will be lower this afternoon at the rate that we’re going.”
Until the berm is deemed safe, a breach would send a deluge of 300 million gallons into surrounding areas — about 50 times the water volume in SeaWorld Orlando’s killer whale tank.
The Manatee County Department of Public Safety, the Florida Division of Emergency Management and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection are commanding the emergency response.
A Wyoming-based company has offered to provide giant portable tanks at Piney Point capable of holding up to 150 million gallons of water, Hopes told commissioners on Tuesday. The tanks are expected to be shipped overnight, but emergency federal authorization is needed to relocate them from one U.S. port to another.
This story was originally published April 6, 2021 at 11:23 AM.
