Red tide is expected to intensify, and scientists point the finger at Piney Point

Almost everyone agrees that the discharge of more than 200 million gallons of polluted water from Piney Point in April was necessary to save lives and property after a leak in one of the phosphate plant’s gypsum stack led to a warning of an imminent collapse.

But not everyone agrees that months later, the discharge has led to one of the worse bouts of red tide seen in the waters of Tampa Bay.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, at a news conference on Wednesday in St. Petersburg, downplayed the effects of the discharge while addressing red tide concerns in the St. Pete communities. DeSantis blamed Hurricane Elsa for moving red tide farther north into the bay.

On Friday, scientists from Tampa Bay Estuary and Sarasota Bay Estuary disputed those claims during a community discussion about red tide and water quality in the bays.

Dave Tomasko, director of the Sarasota Bay Estuary Program said the governor is likely being advised by scientists “we don’t necessarily agree with. Elsa didn’t kill those fish. They were already dead as of the July Fourth weekend and Elsa blew those dead fish toward the shore.”

Ed Sherwood, director of the Tampa Bay Estuary Program and Tomasko, also pointed out that Tampa Bay waters east of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge rarely experience the effects of red tide. But they are now, and it’s not likely coincidence.

“It’s not the first time there has been a leak, but this one was quite significant in the type and amount of nitrogen that went into the bay,” Sherwood said. “We were not concerned with the immediate effects, but now we are a few months past and are experiencing those effects now.”

More than 200 million nitrogen-rich gallons of water from the gypsum stack was released into Tampa Bay. Sherwood said about 45% of that water remains in the bay.

“That is a significant concern for us because we have a lot of sensitive sea grass areas,” he said. “We’ve been having a lot of good water quality before this so there is a concern about what we are seeing now. We are hoping that over time, the algae blooms in the bay will come back to what is considered historical levels, but we just don’t know when that will happen.”

Sherwood said the discharge couldn’t have happened at a worse time.

“We’ve had fairly saline conditions and didn’t get much rain in the spring, so that really promoted the red tide species,” he said. “Those combinations [combined with the discharge] led to this intensification of red tide. We have not seen red tide at these levels since the 1970s.”

DeSantis toured the bay earlier in the week, noting that it looked better than his previous tour a week before. Sherwood said there have been some improvements.

“We are hoping Tampa Bay will continue to improve through the rainy season, but unfortunately that isn’t going to help the coastal communities where we are seeing saltier waters, which will likely make it worse,” he said. “We haven’t seen blooms like this in quite some time. I can’t give a crystal ball guess on what the next couple of weeks will hold, but we do know we aren’t out of the woods yet.”

As of this past week, there has been 1,450 tons of fish killed in the bay and upper Anna Maria Sound. With two more months of hot weather, that number will likely climb significantly.

“We knew Piney Point was an issue,” Sherwood said. “Since that emergency discharge, there will likely be over $100 million spent to close it, but the longer we put that off, the more expensive it will get. So we need to be vigilant about closing that facility.”

More than $2.5 billion has been spent over the past three decades to restore Tampa and Sarasota bays.

“So we can’t let one event set that progress back decades,” Sherwood said.

The health of the bays, Sarasota Bay in particular, is not in the best condition anyway.

Both Sherwood and Tomasko discussed the ill effects of rapidly declining sea grass beds, which serve as a vital food source to manatees and critical fish habitats.

More than 800 manatees have died in the first six months of 2021 alone and Tomasko said the majority of kills are more than likely due to starvation.

“There is an awful lot at stake today,” Tomasko said. “If we don’t do the right things, I’m not sure what this will look like in 20 years.”

Tomasko said manatees have lost 60% of their sea grass beds in the bays and the remaining 40% aren’t healthy enough to sustain a manatee diet.

“This is depressing but it’s important to know,” Tomasko said. “They start to starve and they drown. They lose body fat and can’t surface so a lot of them beach themselves in shallow waters of a canal and that exposes them to cold stress. So when you hear that a manatee died from cold stress, it’s more often than not that they were starving.”

Throw in red tide toxins that settle into the sea grass, and remain well after the bloom is gone, and “it may not be recoverable,” Tomasko said. “Every part of the bay is already impaired.”

The good news is that we are not past the point of no return, Tomasko said. The bay waters are still significantly better than they were 30 years ago, a solid sign that the bays can recover again. Getting red tide under some kind of control may be the determining factor, however.

“We can’t stop it, but we can stop it from being worse,” Tomasko said. “The upper part of the bay lost 2,000 acres of sea grass because of red tide. If we get our act together, it can come back. The lower part of the bay has had problems for years going back to 2013, but we can’t blame that on red tide because it’s been trending in the wrong direction for years.”

Tomasko said the Piney Point discharge was the equivalent of dumping 80,000 bags of fertilizer into the bay, “which is a concentration of nitrogen more than 100 times higher than what comes out of the city of Sarasota.”

Both scientists said another warning sign is water temperatures continue to increase as air temperatures get hotter. The city of Bradenton, for example, has not had a below-freezing temperature in more than a decade. Any incidents like Piney Point or not taking steps to minimize nutrients into the bays “will compound the problem and this will be our new normal on an annual basis,” Sherwood said.

Tomasko said the Piney Point discharge was the “worse thing that happened in decades, even though we understand it had to happen to save lives. But we can’t have something like this happen again.”

And time is running out to turn the tables on the declining state of water quality while red tide blooms increase.

Tomasko said the area will likely have no more than five years to put recovery strategies in place, a combination of personal responsibility, lawn care, monitoring technology, and the continued development of red tide dissipation technologies and enforcement of government regulatory oversight.

“And support restoration activities,” Tomasko said.

Neither scientist could predict what red tide will do next, but both advised that the next two months could get worse before it gets better.

To learn more about the estuary programs, visit tbep.org or sarasotabay.org.

This story was originally published July 23, 2021 at 11:47 AM.