An immense sinkhole opens at the top of a manmade mountain, draining millions of gallons of hazardous phosphate waste deep into the interconnected rivers Florida's main underground drinking water source. Whether you're the greenest of environmentalists, or someone who simply enjoys the benefits of running water, it's a nightmarish scenario. And it happened last September.
With that in mind, this might not be the best time to ask the residents of Manatee County to change their zoning rules to allow an expansion of phosphate mining, but that's what Mosaic Fertilizer, LLC wants to do just 26 miles from where the above-mentioned apocalyptic scenario played out.
You may remember that Mosaic originally planned to approach the Manatee Board of County Commissioners in September to ask it to rezone an area called the Wingate East Parcel from 'agricultural' to 'mining/extraction' and approve the phosphate giant's master plan to mine on some 3,837 acres. There's already mining on adjacent properties Mosaic owns in eastern Manatee County and the company also hopes to expand mining across the county line in western Hardee County, in an area called Ona.
That September meeting was delayed—it's now scheduled for January 26—possibly because of the PR nightmare the September sinkhole ignited. That's when aerial photographs and news reports surfaced alerting the public to the hole that Mosaic and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection had known about since late August. Let's face it: people were pretty pissed they had been kept in the dark for so long. And in swooped Florida Governor Rick Scott to the rescue.
The Mosaic sinkhole and wastewater spills associated with two tropical storms prompted Scott to issue new regulations requiring polluters to quickly notify the public about environmental hazards (Scott's rules have since been nullified by a judge, but the Legislature may pass something in the spring). The governor announced the regulations at Mosaic's New Wales facility near Mulberry in eastern Polk County after taking a helicopter tour above the sinkhole in the phosphogypsum mountain (gyp stack) there.
In what barely passed as English, Scott attempted to describe what he saw while looking down the maw of the sinkhole. Here's what your governor actually said (seriously – go listen to it yourself!).
“Here’s what they said – I’ll tell you what it looks like and then let’s hear what they said. It looks like, so, the way it was explained to me: there’s these layers, OK? They have this, I guess this polyurethane layer that’s supposed to hold … [a reporter says: “It’s a liner”]. Yeah, a liner, that’s supposed to hold – and so he said that was breached. It’s just like it’s – it’s like a – they think it’s a total of possibly – and the biggest is – maximum is 45 feet, which is 15 yards, I guess or about 15 yards wide, but, what you see is it’s just a – you know if you’ve ever been to the beach where you see water just draining down into the sand. That’s what it looks like. It looks like it’s just all messed up.”
Hey, a beach doesn't sound bad, but that 'all messed up' part should probably be a concern.
In September, Hershel Morris, vice president of phosphate operations for Mosaic, told Polk County Commissioners 200 million gallon spill had no impacts beyond Mosaic's property. But a nearby resident said her well is now contaminated. Three others are suing Mosaic.
The good news for Manatee County is that Mosaic doesn't plan to build any of these immense sinkhole-prone gyp stacks there. But the mined material from Manatee would have to be processed into fertilizer and the industrial waste stored in a potential Sinkhole Mountain in Polk, Hillsborough or some other county.
Radioactive sinkhole mess or not, the project could still be hazardous to local ecosystems.
A staff report to the Manatee County Planning Commission indicates the Wingate East mining will impact “686 acres of jurisdictional waters, including 649 acres of wetland habitats.” During an all-day meeting in August the Planning Commission recommended the changes Mosaic is seeking. But several members of the public objected, including Andy Mele, with Suncoast Waterkeeper.
Mele called phosphate mining a “hideous” process that ruins land.
“There's parts of west-central Florida where there's disturbed and ruined land as far as the eye can see, literally,” he said. “Punctuated occasionally by these mountains of phosphogypsum waste that remind you of the ruins of the Mayan pyramids poking up out of the jungle.”
In 2015 Mosaic reached a $2 billion settlement with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in a lawsuit over mishandling toxic material at mines in Florida and Louisiana.
By tearing up the land near the headwaters of the Manatee, Myakka and Peace Rivers at Wingate East in Manatee County, Mele says, “the agricultural potential of the land is gone” for generations of farmers, along with those jobs. Yes, some mining jobs would be created at the mine, but Mele contends Mosaic would just move the jobs from other parts of the state as mining operations there are completed. All the while, most of the phosphate and profit would leave the state through fertilizer exports and shareholder dividends. Mele says if people could actually see what phosphate mining is doing to natural Florida they would be “up in arms.”
Mosaic declined a request for an interview, emailing, “We have multiple community events and projects happening this week and weekend and everyone was tied up.”
Mele and his allies will ask the Manatee County Commission on the 26th to deny Mosaic's request for the zoning change. One expert, Mele said, will urge them not to act out of fear of the “Harris Act,” which the company has used before to get its way.
In 2008, Mosaic sued the county for rejecting a mining permit, and used the Harris act to argue the denial amounted to government “taking” private property. Instead of fighting back, Manatee County Commissioners quickly relented. Mele expects the county's attorney to take Mosaic's side on the Harris question and “foster that myth by basically terrorizing the county commissioners” into disregarding the public's input. But the expert slated to speak on the 26th will argue that denying a zoning change is not “taking” private property and that commissioners should not be afraid to say no.
Mele's group, Suncoast Waterkeeper, also wields the threat of legal action. It's one of the groups that may sue the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for permitting several phosphate mines in west-central Florida (not including the Wingate East site, which it has yet to approve). Mele hopes that compels Manatee County Commissioners to at least delay its decision. Again.
Seán Kinane is assistant news director at 88.5 FM WMNF Community Radio in Tampa -St. Petersburg – Sarasota. This article is based on his reporting on phosphate mining archived at http://wmnf.org/news.
