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Water being pumped into Tampa Bay could cause a massive algae bloom:
Millions of gallons of water laced with fertilizer ingredients are being pumped into Florida's Tampa Bay from a leaking reservoir at an abandoned phosphate plant at Piney Point. As the water spreads into the bay, it carries phosphorus and nitrogen—nutrients that under the right conditions can fuel dangerous algae blooms that can suffocate sea grass beds and kill fish, dolphins and manatees.
It's the kind of risk no one wants to see, but officials believed the other options were worse.
About 300 homes sit downstream from the 480-million-gallon reservoir, which began leaking in late March 2021. State officials determined that pumping out the water was the only way to prevent the reservoir's walls from collapsing. They decided the safest location for all that water would be out through Port Manatee and into the bay.
Journal References:
1.) Jeff C. Ho, Anna M. Michalak, Nima Pahlevan. Widespread global increase in intense lake phytoplankton blooms since the 1980s, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1648-7)
2.) James W. Fourqurean, Carlos M. Duarte, Hilary Kennedy, et al. Seagrass ecosystems as a globally significant carbon stock, Nature Geoscience (DOI: 10.1038/ngeo1477)
3.) Janine Lemaire, Bénédicte Sisto, Hamilton Disston, et al. The Everglades Ecosystem: Under Protection or Under Threat?, Miranda. Revue pluridisciplinaire du monde anglophone / Multidisciplinary peer-reviewed journal on the English-speaking world (DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/miranda.2881)
4.) Brian E. Lapointe, Rachel A. Brewton, Laura W. Herren, et al. Nitrogen enrichment, altered stoichiometry, and coral reef decline at Looe Key, Florida Keys, USA: a 3-decade study, Marine Biology (DOI: 10.1007/s00227-019-3538-9)
(Score: 4, Informative) by fliptop on Saturday April 10 2021, @10:10AM (2 children)
I worked at Cargill when in college and they have a fertilizer plant in Riverview, which is a bit north of where this leak is happening. If the Piney Point plant is similar, I'd guess the water was used to slurry the gypsum waste over to the stack and the pH of the water is probably somewhere near 1. It kills everything it touches.
Back in the day (1920's or thereabouts) they used to pump the waste gypsum directly into the bay. After it started getting to be too much they pumped it onto a stack that sits next to the plant. The old stack at Cargill is about 450 acres at its base and is 200 feet high. You can see the stack across Hillsborough bay from Tampa. They closed it in the late 80's and started a new stack that's a bit more inland (the old one sits directly next to the bay). The closed stack is capped w/ a thick rubber membrane and there's a toe drain that's dug around the base. All the water that runs off the stack and collects in the toe drain is pumped into holding ponds and used to slurry the waste gypsum over to the new stack. The new stack has open ponds on it and next to it [goo.gl] (in that view the closed stack is on the left and the open ponds are dark green). I'm not sure of the protocols in place at the Piney Point plant (since it's no longer in operation) to monitor and maintain the pond dikes' integrity, but I do know that whole area of Florida, from the West coast inland as far as Bartow is dotted w/ facilities that mine the phosphate rock and process it into fertilizer.
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 10 2021, @12:21PM (1 child)
We should set up a pipeline to Washington, D.C. Forget draining the swamp, we'll just make it unlivable!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 10 2021, @05:58PM
As resident of the DC suburbs, I can assure you the Democrats are doing their best right now to make it unlivable. Quality of life is being destroyed by ridiculous decrees. Education and criminal control (much more effective than "gun control") are being destroyed right now by insane policies.