The Mosaic Company says it is continuing efforts to recover more than 215 million gallons of contaminated and mildly radioactive water that poured down a sinkhole into the deep Floridan Aquifer. The aquifer supplies much of the drinking water used throughout the state. The sinkhole developed on August 27th in a so-called “gyp-stack” at the New Wales Plant in Mulberry. That’s about 30 miles east of Tampa.
On Saturday, the Phosphate Coalition, a group of environmental groups opposed to Mosaic’s plans to expand its mines in Manatee and Desoto County, met in Sarasota.The representatives of ten different environmental groups gathered at the Fruitville Library to plan strategy for their testimony to the Manatee County Commissioners on September 29th.
Mosaic is seeking approval to mine an additional 4,000 acres in the county. The citizens groups believe that especially in light of the current sinkhole disaster, that approval should be denied.
Larry Grossman of the Manatee Sierra Club says the commissioners need to look well beyond the claimed economic benefit of the new mine and examine the public health aspects.
“We have seen what happened in Flint, Michigan through the contamination with lead. Public bodies who are entrusted to protect the public’s health can be complicit in just the opposite, in endangering people’s health through neglect", said Grossman. "That’s a public agency; now you have a private corporation, perhaps having the same effect. So, if not the regulatory agencies, who will protect the public’s health and the public’s interest?”
Grossman and others at the meeting were concerned that the waste material generated by the conversion of phosphate rock from the expanded mine into phosphate fertilizer would be dumped on one or more existing gyp-stacks, since no new stacks are permitted.
A gyp-stack is a man-made mountain of mildly radioactive waste, often as large as 500 acres. On top of the stack is a pond of waste water generated from the fertilizer manufacturing process. It’s a 200 million gallon pond of this acidic water that broke through the gyp-stack at the New Wales plant, pouring into the sinkhole, and according to Mosaic, dropping about 800 feet into the Floridan Aquifer.
Mosaic has at least one well in the area that the company is using in an attempt to recover the polluted water. The company currently says that they have no evidence that the waste water has contaminated local water wells used by nearby homeowners.
Environmentalists are concerned that the Desoto County commissioners will ignore the gyp-stack problem since no new toxic waste resulting from the expanded mine will be dumped in their county. Grossman says that dealing with Mosaic and phosphate mining “should be handled as a development of regional, if not state, impact,” and that a single county commission should not have the authority to allow expansion of the mine
Grossman points out that the waste material generated by the requested new mine would have to be dumped on existing gyp stacks. And he expressed concern that the additional millions of tons of solid and liquid waste might cause those stacks to rupture, further threatening Florida’s drinking water supply.
The environmentalists at the meeting also questioned why it took the Florida Department of Environmental Protection and Mosaic nearly three weeks to inform the public of the disaster. Calls to Mosaic’s public information officials by WGCU have not yet been returned.