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Florida swamped by red tide – but is fertilizer plant spill making it worse?:
Piles of dead fish, dolphins, turtles and manatees are rotting on the shorelines of coastal Florida in a soup of reddish brown ocean water after a devastating so-called "red tide" algal bloom struck sea life in the region.
The city council in St Petersburg, Florida, called for a state of emergency last week saying that crews need help getting the dead sea creatures cleaned up from the beaches. In the Pinellas county area, more than 800 tons of dead fish and sea life have washed ashore – and the smell is already hitting the cities.
Red tides do happen in the area, but this year's incident is so serious that it is causing some experts to wonder if a pollution accident at a former fertilizer plant called Piney Point could be a reason it is so bad.
In March, a dam at a reservoir at the defunct plant that stored phosphate wastewater began to fail, prompting temporary evacuations of nearby residents on 1 April. Two days later, Florida's governor, Ron DeSantis, issued a state of emergency. The plant released 215m gallons of contaminated water into Tampa Bay in an effort to prevent the reservoir's collapse.
[...] Blooms usually start in the fall and go away by January, but summer blooms in the area have occurred a handful of times in more recent history: 1995, 2005 and, most recently, 2018. That year, a long-lasting red tide bloom killed sea life as large as manatees and dolphins, caused widespread health effects and drove tourists away from beaches.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Tuesday July 20 2021, @10:44PM (2 children)
I have to wonder how widespread the, er, "inattention" was to this and like problems during what appears to be a temporally-localized recent few years [theguardian.com]. And if other loose-cannon activist structural engineers are searching the recent archives for other reports to predict other similar imminent/proximate events.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday July 20 2021, @11:50PM (1 child)
Piney Point is pure political purchasing power on parade. Buy the rights to overfill a retention pond, under-engineer the retaining walls, etc. and then flee the country with the profits. Florida has more in common with the Banana Republics than the weather.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 21 2021, @01:14AM
Damn! Try saying your alliterative first sentence five times as fast as you can!