Over the weekend, more than 300 families were evacuated from the neighborhood surrounding the plant. Had the Piny Point leak unleashed a tidal wave of wastewater, as officials feared for days it might, it could have contaminated groundwater, seeped into nearby farms, and potentially destroyed homes. In September of last year, a site manager from Piney Point noted at a county commissioners' meeting that the site’s ponds were quickly reaching capacity and threatening to pollute Tampa Bay. In 2016, a sinkhole opened under a 190-foot gypsum stack, draining the 215 million gallons of wastewater it stored and dispersing it in a nearby aquifer. A dike broke and 55 million gallons of water poured into the Alafia River, killing an estimated one million fish, according to a 2003 article from the Tampa Bay Times. In 1997, heavy rains filled a wastewater pond at a similar plant in Florida’s Polk County. “This issue of these stacks failing, leaking, getting holes in them is well documented.” “The industry is one of the single largest threats to Florida,” says Jaclyn Lopez, the Florida director at the Center for Biological Diversity. An estimated one billion tons of phosphogypsum is housed in 24 stacks across Florida, and every year, about 30 million more tons are added to them. Toxic ponds still lingerįlorida produces 80 percent of the phosphate mined in the United States. While the facility hasn’t been operating for 20 years, environmental advocates want to see the ponds covered or drained to prevent further disaster. “A lot of folks say ‘you can’t let a good disaster go to waste,’ and I think now we have the political will to close the facility,” says Burke. If there’s a silver lining, it’s that the spill highlights this environmental threat. Piney Point was built to produce fertilizer in 1966 and has housed several remaining phosphogypsum stacks since it closed in 2001. For every ton of fertilizer-ready phosphorus produced, about five tons of phosphogypsum is left behind, according to the EPA. The ponds are constructed on top of what’s called a phosphogypsum stack, or “gyp stack” for short-a mountain of naturally radioactive byproduct. After it’s used to process mined phosphate, the water is piped to the pond to cool and evaporate. The leaky pond at Piney Point, owned by a group called HRK Holdings, was built to hold the watery byproduct of producing phosphorus , one of the essential ingredients in fertilizer. Environmentalists, however, say the incident refocuses attention on what they have considered a disaster in waiting that has threatened Florida’s waterways for years. Officials are now beginning to test the water. The extent of any potential damage remains unclear.

In a worst-case scenario, the nutrients could cause a “red tide”-a toxic algal bloom of the kind that in the past have wreaked havoc on Florida’s coastlines, killing fish, shellfish, turtles, dolphins, and manatees. Just like they help crops grow in fields, these nutrients fuel explosive growth in algae, which in turn can kill an unknown portion of the bay’s wildlife, become a human health hazard, and jeopardize local businesses. The effect could be a disaster for marine life. “If they drain the whole pond, it’s basically the equivalent of a year’s worth of being delivered from one source over a two-week period,” says Maya Burke, the assistant director of the Tampa Bay Estuary Program.

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