A recent visit to the Mulberry Phosphate Museum was fascinating, with its finds of prehistoric giant ground sloths, mammoths, sharks, manatees and crocodiles, and even a 3000-year-old dugout canoe, all unearthed by equipment used in phosphate mining.
Wall murals show how mining companies in Florida restore the land after the mines are exhausted, even to the point of hosting threatened Florida scrub jays and gopher tortoises.
Missing from the diorama is what happens when it all goes wrong.
Lining gypsum stacks with material that wasn’t supposed to deteriorate and filling them with wastewater from the Piney Point phosphate mine never sounded like the best idea, but it likely was the most cost-effective idea.
Now that there’s a breach, and the ongoing discharge of hundreds of millions of gallons of wastewater into local waters to avert a worse breach, we’re faced with the prospect of an environmental disaster unseen since the Deepwater Horizon oil spill began in April 2010.
Why can’t the wastewater be pumped into containers at Port Manatee instead of into our precious, beautiful and interconnected waterways, where nitrogen and phosphorus from the wastewater is undoubtedly going to feed red tide, and where other toxins may kill fish even before the red tide gets them?
Containers could be stored indefinitely, or transported to a treatment plant, which, by the way, could have been mandated on site when the mine was permitted.
Surely there is emergency money for such a solution in the state’s budget, if not the Florida Department of Environmental Protection’s budget.
If state leaders are not able to come up with a better solution to this crisis than dumping phosphate mining wastewater into the pristine waters that attract our visitors, why continue to spend money on advertising for tourists?
Especially this time of year – when it’s spring, and we’re just peeking out from the pandemic – it’s heartbreaking to realize that in the coming weeks, we may see vacations ruined by red tide, fish kills and respiratory symptoms, and maybe things even worse than red tide. We may see vacation rental cancellations and businesses floundering, just when they’re about to regain normalcy from the pandemic.
Thanks to a lack of responsibility, wisdom, foresight and possibly even concern among government officials, visitors and residents will likely be avoiding the beaches this summer – the one place where we almost felt comfortable during the year of the coronavirus.
To the families evacuated from their homes just before Easter Sunday, to the people who have spent decades volunteering to plant seagrasses and count scallops and create oyster beds in area waters, to those who make their livings on the water, to the marine life, and to all the people of Tampa Bay, mine owners and state officials owe more than mitigation and an apology.
They must choose a solution to this crisis that does no further harm.
