Piney Point mess again exposes Florida’s dirty relationship with phosphate industry | Opinion

Like many people in the general Tampa Bay area who care about the environment and many people from Manatee County who were personally concerned for the safety of their homes and water supply, I have been watching the Piney Point crisis evolve in horror and amazement.

In Part One of this saga, a leak in the liner of a huge waste retention pond on the site of the derelict phosphate mining site, Piney Point, is discovered and declared in imminent danger of possible total collapse. In an emergency effort to keep the huge wave of polluted liquid that would be released from flooding nearby residences, a large discharge of the untreated waste is released into Tampa Bay through nearby Port Manatee. This temporarily stabilizes the leak and the immediate flood emergency is declared over, evacuations ended and nearby roads reopened. Florida politicians at all levels who have long kicked cleaning up this site down the financial and political road, declare that they will force the HRK Holdings, the owners of the site, to complete cleanup at their own expense.

In Part Two, the Manatee County commissioners and their interim county administrator come out in favor of a new fix: Drilling a really deep well and pumping the remaining waste water from the deteriorating pond into it. Every scientist, engineer and environmental group that has expressed an opinion of this plan opposes it.

Why?

The proposed well drilled through the many layers of Florida’s highly striated topography would most assuredly leak from the porous layers into our ground water and seep into our estuaries, lakes, springs and ultimately into Tampa Bay where its high nutrient content would promote red tide blooms.

This brings to mind the question, why are the Manatee commissioners, not a scientist, engineer or, heaven forbid, environmentalist among them, in charge of this decision unquestioned by any regulatory agency, say the Florida Department of Environmental Protection? Oh yeah, ex-Gov. Rick Scott stripped the FDEP of most of its regulatory responsibilities, leaving the phosphate industry in Florida virtually uncontrolled. The Republican-controlled Florida Legislature is busily passing bills to supply $200 million in taxpayer dollars for this ill fated project and Commissioner Vanessa Baugh declares it a perfect clean-up solution, raising another question, why all this support for what amounts to a sweep under the rug of the Piney Point disaster area at taxpayers’ expense?

Part Three: Phosphate strip mining giant Mosiac, far from being defunct, has monopoly control of the industry in Florida and is growing as fast as it can persuade counties to sell it land and “regulators” into issuing it mining permits. (I use it because in real life we all know that corporations are not actually people.) It’s a dirty industry and its operations are steadily producing the same type of environmental time bombs that almost blew up at Piney Point at their sites all over central Florida. The leaky ponds and radioactive gypsym stacks are still the accepted and unpaid for externalities it produces. Its contributions to the campaign funds of supporters and the funding of groovy projects for counties like the new Mosaic Family Universe exhibit at the Bishop Museum in Bradenton grease the wheels.

(Aside: Does the exhibit include a diorama of a landscape devastated by strip mining and ineffectively “mitigated” with a topsoil dump dotted by mostly dead or dying plantings? The museum should sponsor a field trip for county officials to see the real thing in their own back yards!)

No Florida Republican politician on any level wants to openly oppose Mosaic, a powerful and reliable ally.

Part Four: What do the citizens of Florida receive in return for this preferential treatment of the phosphate industry by our politicians? Big-time assistance for the election and re-election of our esteemed Republican lawmakers.

Nifty civics projects for persuadable counties that they could get off their butts and fund for themselves without the huge environmental toll phosphate mining exacts.

Tons and tons of a product that can be profitably produced only by putting our water supply in danger and whose use is banned in Republican-controlled Manatee County in the wet season because its runoff from farm fields and yards most assuredly contributed to the massive red tide outbreaks Tampa Bay-dependent tourism and fishing industries have suffered in recent years, or so our scientists tell us!

Note: Interested in combating Mosaics’s operations and growth in Florida? I’ve been informed by experienced protesters that the most effective means of resistance is researching and protesting the permits under which they operate and shirk responsibility for environmental damage.

Or there’s the old fashion way: join the Sarasota and Manatee Democratic Environmental Caucuses for an Earth Day protest of the phosphate industry in Florida from 5 to 7 p.m. on April 22 at the Unconditional Surrender statue in the Sarasota’s Bayfront Park.

Jane Sellick, member Manatee Democratic Environmental Caucus.