Mosaic mining toxins imperil aquifer

Our aquifer is under attack.

The over-building pandemic, phosphate strip mining, agriculture, etc. are all competing with us for water from our aquifer.

Water is a precious commodity yet the massive sinkhole in the New Wales gypstack added millions of gallons of water containing cadmium, an extremely toxic metal; radium, nitrogen and phosphorus, the rubber/plastic liner and toxic fragments from the stack itself to our aquifer, compliments of FDEP and EPA.

Florida has 24 gypstacks which will receive 30 million new tons of toxic waste each year (http://www.thephosphaterisk.com/news/story/165/). When will the next gypstack event be? The monitoring wells are too shallow to monitor activity at bottom of stacks. The state should consider requiring all gypstacks across Florida be capped and closed to further activity.

Mosaic has agreed to test water of neighboring citizens. A gesture of good will or a plan to obfuscate the truth.

The third party tester is ECT, a consultant for Mosaic just as with the Areawide Environmental Impact Study (AEIS), which was paid for by Mosaic to achieve the desired outcome. It was terribly flawed.

Mosaic apologized for the reporting delay and said postponement of Wingate East application had nothing to do with the current events. Not so. The Manatee County Planning Commission meets once a week; the regular meeting was Aug. 11, then a special planning commission meeting was held the following week on Aug. 18, just for the Mosaic Wingate East Mine.

Mosaic was certainly on a fast track in August and now the brakes are on until January 2017. It appears their TV commercials have waned just as their environmental company mantra.

Class action suits against Mosaic have been filed and rightly so for this criminal act.

This story was originally published September 25, 2016 at 4:08 PM with the headline "Mosaic mining toxins imperil aquifer."