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posted by mrpg on Saturday April 10 2021, @12:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the could dept.

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)


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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday April 10 2021, @06:42PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Saturday April 10 2021, @06:42PM (#1135753)

    There are multiple standard DOT tanker car styles and they are built to a specific gravity standard and if you fill a low density oil tank car with pure distilled water that'll overweight it by 20% and it "might" fail. Certainly if it as much as leaks one drop they'll be infinite legal issues if you put high density fluids in a low density car.

    Anyway to one sig fig figure 25K gallons and 250K pounds per tank car.

    So figure it would only take 19200 tank cars. Again a shitty one sig fig engineering estimate is the USA has about 1e4 of each density of tank car and maybe 1e5 total tank cars so its possible in theory.

    Something to think about is 20K tank cars at maybe 50 feet each would be a train 200 miles long. Not that you'd make one train, but its a logistical fact if you want to transfer all that in two days you'd have to average about 5 mph continuous in the pumping yard just to have 20K cars pass by a fixed position in only two days. Tricky! Maybe possible but probably not.

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