On the night of December 24, 2002 — last Christmas Eve — Sam Zamani from Florida's Department of Environmental Protection was not home with his family. He was not warm and toasty but on the side of a large hill that holds millions of gallons of dangerous waters threatening Tampa Bay from Piney Point.
In hopes of closing down one of two lakes containing the deadly waters atop this artificial mountain between Tampa and Bradenton, some water had been drawn high into one lake and left low in the other.
Now it was raining, inches and inches, and water was creeping up, straining the capacity of the higher lake's walls. If the walls were to breach and the water to spill, Tampa Bay would be on the receiving end of what could be the most catastrophic phosphate accident in the history of the industry.
The wall didn't breach, but a week later, on New Year's Eve, my wife and I were on our way to dinner when a great storm erupted and the power went out. I had to use a flashlight to get out of my house.
Sam Zamani was not reveling at any party or on his way to dinner. He was back on top of the hill. He was conferencing with engineers and with a DEP superior in Tallahassee. Water was blowing over the sides of the lake's walls. The rain was falling again, a torrent. While you and I were dining or toasting or dancing, we were completely unaware that Tampa Bay's life was, quite possibly, in jeopardy, just as we had no idea of knowing that Sam and his colleagues were saving it, in all likelihood. They made a reluctant decision to let the overflowing water return to the second lake.
Where it remains.
Sam and the DEP inherited this problem when Mulberry Corporation, the parent of Piney Point Phosphates, went bankrupt and ceased operations in 2001. That Sam is stuck with the problem is ironic because Sam recommended to his superiors as early as 1991 that Piney Point's facility be closed.
Even on New Year's Day, while I was sleeping late and dreaming of spiked eggnog like my father used to make when we watched the Rose Bowl, Sam Zamani was on site.
In my times, I have shared with fellow environmentalists my frustration with the DEP during the current administration. We have called it "Department of Easy Permits." We have said the letters stand for "Don't Expect Protection." I sparred with the DEP over incinerators alongside the Ichetucknee River, thinking we'd won the "Battle on the Ichetucknee," until I woke one day to find that while I had been fighting fair and square with gloves on, they had hit me over the head with a chair and reversed their decision. I begged, with some success, for help with maps for books and tried, unsuccessfully, to get the DEP to buy land for preservation. My underpaid friends in the state park service were reorganized into the DEP, then downsized. I have, at times, sputtered and fumed at DEP personnel over issues, until they must have thought I had rabies.
For some of these things, I feel like personally apologizing to Sam Zamani. I don't know Sam well, but I respect him. We are lucky to have people on the ramparts trying to protect us as well as they can. It is too bad they have to be in such a position in the first place.
If there had been a spill, millions of fishes, birds and tiny organisms would have died on contact. The waters going into the bay would have turned surrounding waters for some distance pea green from algae blooms. The algae would have blocked sunlight to the seagrasses. Those grasses would have died.
"Could a spill from Piney Point under the right conditions be the straw that broke Tampa Bay's back?" I asked Charles Kovach from the DEP. He and his staff are responsible for testing the health of Bishop Harbor, where the waters would go first before entering Tampa Bay. A thoughtful look crossed Charles' face, and he did not answer. "We don't know" is what I think he finally said.
It sure couldn't help.
Our Tampa Bay
Up to 1.2-billion gallons of wastewaters from fertilizer manufacture have sat in the two lakes and two associated ponds atop the artificial mountain at Piney Point. Those lakes were built over a number of years by various owners.
Since New Year's Eve, the threat of such a catastrophic accident may have diminished some, but it is still not gone, according to the DEP. What is Tampa Bay? The heart of our community. Around it, 2-million Floridians live, play, love, suffer, laugh and die. It is not the Tampa Bucs, but the Tampa Bay Bucs. Why? Because those living here consider themselves part of a larger community, and the center of it is the bay.
Some humans sit along bay shores watching the sunset with wine and cheese. Our finest restaurants overlook it, places you take your significant other on Valentine's Day because the views are considered romantic. Couples with lesser budgets spoon beside it on blankets.
Encased in metal, plastic and glass, the motor-driven speed across its causeways and bridges in hectic daily activities, and perhaps they blithely take the bay for granted. Exuberant beach revelers race over it on jet-skis. Fishermen cast into it from bridges, docks and boats. By The Pier in St. Petersburg, colorful regattas put forth.
Less noticed are the creatures who live in and around the bay. Birds in rookeries. Porpoises in pods. Schools of fish. All the tiny thriving organisms in an ecosystem. Even sharks and manatees.
Joggers, bicyclists and power walkers move along the sides of the Courtney Campbell or Friendship Trail on the old Gandy Bridge. Kayakers and canoeists pass through mangrove tunnels in Tampa Bay's aquatic preserves, like Bishop Harbor.
Bishop Harbor is connected to Piney Point by a series of canals. The harbor itself is a small estuary of Tampa Bay.
I first paddled Bishop Harbor in 2002 exploring Manatee County's Blueway, or paddling trail.
Most impressive in the clear waters were prolific stingrays, one of which swam over to look up at me with human-like curiosity. Luminous blue eyes from an alien creature stared into the atmosphere at the monster above, a man.
I got out of the canoe and walked left on the mangrove fringe. The ray swam in my direction. When I walked right, the ray swam following me.
We both stared at each other, me looking down, it looking up. I walked back and forth until I was tired of it, but the ray never got bored. People are fickle. Wild animals are not, even a fish with a stinger.
Red and black mangroves cling to oyster beds in Bishop Harbor. Little green herons hide in the salt-tolerant trees. In the harbor's northwest corner, in an area called Hells Half-Acre, were six roseate spoonbills and ducks. Great blue herons, white egrets, ibis and other birds were obvious.
On my last trip, I was startled by rapidly swimming redfish — a few shot by like small torpedoes. The harbor surface boiled with redfish, snook and stingrays, and mullet made their usual long and spectacular series of leaps.
Out of the mouth of Bishop Harbor lie extensive seagrasses, essential to keeping Tampa Bay healthy. Turn right toward Cockroach Bay, left toward Terra Ceia, both of which are also aquatic preserves. These are some of the most precious areas remaining in Tampa Bay.
The State of the Bay
Once all Tampa Bay was rich with fishes like Bishop Harbor, with grasses prolific like Terra Ceia. Now it is not.When I was a squirt, my friends and I, armed with fishing poles and the thoughtlessness of the period, could catch a hundred fish in a few hours. When I had a stepson in my first marriage, I took him fishing in the same spots about 15 years ago.
Not a bite. What had happened? The monster in the sky had diminished greatly the largest open water estuary in Florida. Our bay is a whopper, almost 400 square miles, and we couldn't catch one fish in it.
In thoughtless days, rich mangrove estuaries were cleared for homes. Vast mangrove forests were wiped-out for docks and marinas for boats and unimpeded bay views for homeowners. "Fingers" of land were dredged for water-view homes, destroying habitat and altering flows. Canals were dug, which brought silt.
Seawalls rim portions of the bay. Once I witnessed hordes of horseshoe crabs arriving to lay eggs and finding instead seawall.
Boaters have dribbled gasoline and oil, their props have scarred seagrass beds, their mindless acts littered the bottom with beer cans, soda bottles and sometimes the kitchen sink. There are more than 100,000 pleasure boats in the area, most operated responsibly, one hopes, although it is hard to tell sometimes. Oil tankers spilled much larger slicks into Tampa Bay in more dramatic fashion.
For decades too much sewage seeped into the bay, causing algae to bloom, shading the seagrasses to death. Storm-water runoff carried soil, pesticides and fertilizers, and industrial operations contributed their own goo. Stuff going up from incinerators came down with rains.
Scallops, which filter sea water, were once so plentiful people got their dinner sifting through handfuls of seagrasses. Try to find a scallop in most of Tampa Bay now. For most of the bay, a scallop is now a rare treasure.
The Courtney Campbell Causeway severed the upper bay from normal flows, while shipping channels were gouged into the bottom. Just to maintain Tampa Bay's shipping channels requires yanking up 1-million cubic yards of bay bottom annually. How much is that? Fills 100,000 dump trucks.
Tampa Bay has lost over 80% of the seagrasses it was estimated to have had a century ago. Mangrove estuary has dipped by about 50% of historic levels.
So why do we care about Piney Point? The bay is a wasteland, right? Not really. Although we can still wreck it completely, Tampa Bay is a survivor, a testament to the power of nature. There have also been improvements in the health of Tampa Bay of late that would be a shame to lose.
Dick Eckenrod of the Tampa Bay Estuary Program pointed these improvements out. Dick's office acts as a clearing house and coordinator for the cities and counties around Tampa Bay and a number of agencies involved in bringing back the bay's health. The goal has focused mostly on improving the water quality in Tampa Bay so that seagrasses could expand.
Over a period of about 12 years, 4,000 acres of seagrass have made a comeback, a commendable success. Shoreline habitat has been restored — 1,500 acres of it. Seagrasses are being planted in mitigation around Port Manatee near Bishop Harbor because of improvements to shipping lanes. There are other successes, including an increase in fish populations.
Given enough time and care, Tampa Bay might recover more — if we don't harm it further.
Drastic Business
What to do with the acidic process water at Piney Point that threatens Tampa Bay?It might be useful to realize how the water got there. The artificial lakes were made over years when mined phosphate rock was brought to a plant at Piney Point and turned into fertilizer.
A byproduct of making fertilizer is phosphogypsum. This is what the walls of the artificial hill holding the lakes at Piney Point are made from. The gyp was pumped there because there is no use for it.
Once gyp was sold for road building, but the EPA banned it because it has radioactive radium and emits radon gas. So gyp is just stacked nearby wherever fertilizer is made in Florida. In Central Florida, there are around 20 stacks, some with one lake filled with contaminated water from the fertilizer-making process, others with two.
In an active gyp stack, heated process water evaporates about as fast as rain falls. Piney Point is not an active stack. Site engineers estimate one inch of rain puts 12.6-million gallons of water back into the lakes.
Thus, you not only have to remove the nasty waters left over from making fertilizer. You also have to get rid of the water that rains into it.
How much water did the DEP need to get rid of to prevent an accidental spill of tremendous harm to Tampa Bay?
The DEP asked the EPA's regional office in Atlanta for permission to dump treated water into the Gulf of Mexico to avoid a catastrophic spill. The DEP said "failure to transfer 484-million gallons of water off site as quickly as possible will result in imminent risk to human health and safety." In the permit request, the DEP estimated "the risk for a potential spill is high." Four scenarios for dike breaches were discussed with spillage "in excess of 100-million gallons" in "an anticipated 100-foot wide, 5- to 7-foot deep dike breach."
Treated waters aimed for the Gulf are piped to Port Manatee and aboard the barge The New York. A tug takes the barge over 100 miles to sea where water is dribbled into the Gulf, several million gallons each trip.
The DEP has employed another controversial option to protect Tampa Bay, as well as less visible ones. Water is treated then released directly into Bishop Harbor, thus into Tampa Bay.
These waters carry extra nitrogen in the form of ammonia, a compound kind of like tear gas. Nitrogen causes things to grow. Unfortunately, it doesn't make the right things grow at sea or in Tampa Bay.
We are adding harmful fertilizer into the Gulf by barge and into Tampa Bay through Bishop Harbor. Whether there will be negative consequences cannot be foretold.
The EPA permit has a limited lifetime. The DEP recently said they want to get two barges and extend the permit.
Defenders of treating and releasing the water into the Gulf point out that it is just a little bit. It is nothing like what comes in from the Mississippi River.
It is still something that wasn't there before.
Glenn Compton of Manasota-88 thinks incineration is the answer. The most common form of incineration is spray drying, in which water is sprayed into the top of an incinerator: pebbles of waste end up at the bottom, while the water is vaporized by the heat. This form was one of a number of incineration alternatives the DEP considered and rejected.
If incineration is needed, the DEP has yet to order the equipment, which they declined to do in part because they said it would take 18 months to be operational. Not so, according to industry sources, who say used equipment could be purchased and operating on site in six months or less.
In hindsight, maybe an incinerating system should have been acquired, because incineration might be needed eventually as the stack is drawn down and the pollutants in the lakes intensify. When strengthened, the waters could not be treated by present methods.
More money should have been allocated sooner by the state legislature, Glenn thinks. The entire operation does cost money.
It is estimated by the DEP that it will cost well over $100-million to close down the menace at Piney Point. Another plant formerly owned by Mulberry Corporation is also costing state money to close. The total bill for Mulberry going out of business could be $160-million or more.
This money is coming from the tax on each ton of phosphate "severed" from the earth. Unfortunately, that money was meant for better things, including land reclamation and conservation.
As for Bishop Harbor, cross your fingers.
In the past, the releases into Bishop Harbor have stopped and started. No one wants them. The DEP has defended them as being necessary to drain the stack quickly enough to avoid flooding from heavy rains. They may stop and start again.
Charles Kovach and his staff test sea waters for the DEP both in Bishop Harbor and in the Gulf. Thus far, there have been no noticeable long-term effects, he says.
Once there was a "mahogany" tide, as opposed to a red tide, in Bishop Harbor. But it is gone now.
In testing, among other activities, dives are made to selected test grids of seagrasses in Bishop Harbor where Charles measures things like the number of leaves on turtle grass and leaf length for growth rate.
Water is also sampled by independent environmental consultants and Manatee County.
At present levels, 55 pounds of ammonia go into Tampa Bay every day. Multiply this by the length of Noah's Flood and you are dealing in tons. Enough ammonia could result in blooming algae shading-out seagrasses.
This cannot be harmless, and although an algae bloom might not happen, the long-term results may be difficult to foretell.
The Future
Long-term consequences of phosphate mining and fertilizer production are widespread and far flung. Somewhat like a meteorite smacking into the ocean, ripples go everywhere, although daily mining and fertilizer manufacture are much less dramatic. Unlike in Hollywood, there is no gang of roughneck miners, including a gritty father and the handsome beau of the father's daughter, being shot into space with drills and determination to save us from the monster above. We, like Pogo in the famous cartoon, have met the enemy, and he is us.
No lovely woman watches over TV while her father sacrifices his life for the planet. This is more like reality TV, but much less sophomorically amusing, and infinitely more difficult to deal with. Unlike reality TV, you have to think to deal with this problem. The sacrifices you would have to make would be in time and effort.
So let's digress through a labyrinth of reality for those who wish to consider phosphate, fertilizer and Tampa Bay.
Some have said the DEP should have acted faster to close Piney Point. Possibly. Regulation of the phosphate industry, however, has some built-in Catch-22s that would make even Joseph Heller proud.
Right now, if the DEP pulls a company's mining permit because it is failing financially, we the taxpayers end up owning gyp stacks and mining companies. Lucky us. To make matters worse, there is no real provision for the company involved to pay the cost of closing the stack if the company goes broke.
One could sue them, but what if they are going broke? What can you get from a company gone bust? If Mulberry Corporation is any indication, not enough.
Then, let's have the DEP levy fines against bankrupt companies. But what good are fines against a failing business except to push them further into failure?
On the other hand, you can't just seize an operating business while it has assets that could pay for closing it down. The business might make an economic turnaround. People will lose their jobs if a wrong decision is made.
There is no guarantee against business failure, in the phosphate industry or elsewhere. In the early days of the phosphate frontier, perhaps 200 companies mined. Now there are four. Only two of those were in business in Florida when the phosphate industry was first regulated in the early 1970s. Back then Earth Day was a new concept.
The DEP has proposed new guidelines for financial responsibility for stack operation that the agency hopes will address who will pay for potential problems in the future. The point of these proposed new rules is to make sure there is enough money to pay for closing down stacks if the state has to take them over, not to prevent bankruptcy or to defend Tampa Bay.
These new proposals require the fertilizer companies to determine the cost of closing down a stack. Then every year for 20 years they have to put 5% of the costs into a form of tangible collateral, such as insurance or bonds. It's a little more complicated than that, but that's the heart of the proposal.
Where does this leave Tampa Bay? Vulnerable.
Fertilizer is manufactured at several sites along the Alafia River and at a plant that would spill into the Hillsborough River if there were an accident. Besides the one at Piney Point, an even larger stack sits on the shore of Tampa Bay at the mouth of the Alafia. That's the large mound you can see across the water from Tampa's Bayshore Boulevard.
Those are all operational plants. The companies seem financially sound. Can we safely assume those plants will never hurt Tampa Bay? Or the business will go on forever? No.
You remember that day after you had a fight with your significant other? Or the day you learned someone dear to you was dying? Or the day it was almost 5 p.m., you were coming down with the flu, and all you wanted was to get home fast to a cold beer and hot shower? Maybe you never had a day like that, but I have. You become distracted driving your vehicle, ending up with your bumper placed in the back of a truck driven by a fellow twice your size who doesn't look happy.
Human error, that's all it takes for an accident. You didn't want the accident. You were having a bad day.
All the existing mining and processing companies may have the best personnel, highly trained and motivated, and stacks designed by the finest engineers of the highest standards. I don't know if that is true or false, but we must leave it to the DEP inspectors and engineers who inspect stacks on a regular basis.
The odds of an accident at a stack may be small. Whatever you do, however, you cannot rule out human error and potential accidents. Further, phosphate mining and fertilizer processing take place on colossal scales, thus truly bad accidents involve millions of gallons of potentially harmful waters.
Unfortunately, Piney Point is now in the ER. The patient is Tampa Bay. The operation is in progress. You and I can ask the legislature to make sure the DEP has enough money to do the operation fast and efficiently. We can also ask the doctor to operate faster. We can ask for all care to be taken for the patient. We can ask for alternative treatments to be considered. We can gather outside the operating door, hold hands, and conduct a prayer vigil.
Most of all, we need to look beyond Piney Point into the future.
Protecting Tampa Bay
There are many issues with the bay besides fertilizer plant spills. The potential debacle at Piney Point has pushed the overall phosphate risk to the foreground. Dumping treated waters into the Gulf and Bishop Harbor has kept it on citizens' radar screens.
Logically the first step toward protecting Tampa Bay is to vigorously bring it back to robust health to the greatest degree possible. This would allow it an opportunity to survive the inevitable accidents it will receive from various industries. The value of such an effort is priceless, but has positive economic consequences for fishing and tourism.
We should ask that all the agency programs involved in improving Tampa Bay's health be put in high gear. Unfortunately, right now most agencies are experiencing funding shortages.
Citizens can become involved through education with the Tampa Bay Estuary Program. They can also sign up to do volunteer work.
While it would seem a fair question whether, given the state of Tampa Bay, we should allow potentially harmful industrial operations to continue, there is no mechanism to vote yes or no. In fact, when it gets down to mining, even state legislators don't get to vote all the time.
Hillsborough, Manatee and Pinellas counties do not have a strong enough voice in mining and fertilizer production because these operations occur upstream, often in other counties. Mining is permitted by a vote of the county commission where it occurs, despite system-wide effects in other counties.
There are a bunch of state agencies involved in the permitting, and regional councils. On the regional councils, there is a small chance someone you voted for has a say.
But mines are permitted in far-off counties largely without bay residents' consent even though Tampa Bay is downstream. Charlotte County has, for years, held the pesky opinion that they have a right to be involved in phosphate permitting on lands in other counties in the Peace River Drainage, which empties into Charlotte Harbor. Their activities have delayed and perhaps stopped new mining. Nearly everyone in the permitting process, at one time or the other, thought they didn't belong in it. But it's hard to see why they shouldn't be.
So should Pinellas, Manatee and Hillsborough counties.
A large estuary like Tampa Bay involves multiple counties and multiple rivers. The freshwater rivers, down which spills might flow, are essential for a healthy estuary in our bay. The overall ecosystem needs protection, and the system is the Tampa Bay Drainage, which includes all of us, not just counties upriver where mining takes place.
Tim Ohr, a regular contributor to these pages on environmental and other issues, can be reached at TimOhr@mindspring.com.
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This article appears in Nov 6-12, 2003.
