“You don’t want to stay silent on this stuff because you don’t want this stuff to happen. But then on the other side, you have guys whose livelihoods depends on the water. If you’re telling everybody in the world that the fishery is dying, then nobody wants to come here. I mean, that’s the price you have to pay in the short term, which sucks to get it right in the long run.”
For local environmental advocates, the red tide event has underscored the necessity of strongly regulating the fertilizer industry. Fertilizer is big business in Florida, which supplies 80 percent of the country’s phosphate, a key ingredient in the product. Phosphate processing results in enormous amounts of radioactive byproduct, which then is piled into tall stacks that form barriers around wastewater ponds. When these reservoirs are breached, this wastewater can threaten to flood residential communities and freshwater sources. That’s what happened at Piney Point in the spring, which left local officials no choice but to relieve pressure on the stacks by discharging wastewater into the bay.
In late June, a coalition of conservation groups sued Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and state environmental regulators, alleging that they have failed to properly manage defunct fertilizer facilities. The plaintiffs claimed that officials not only ignored multiple warnings about the structural integrity of the stacks at Piney Point, but that they are still failing to adequately regulate fertilizer facilities. For example, advocates point to an ongoing state permitting process that would allow another fertilizer plant a few miles inland from Tampa Bay to expand its byproduct storage capacity across 230 acres.
“This should be a wake-up call for everybody that we can’t continue business as usual,” said Jaclyn Lopez, Florida director and senior attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, a plaintiff in the lawsuit. “There should be real reckoning, there should be accountability for the federal or state agency that was supposed to manage Piney Point, and everybody involved in its failure.”
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