Commissioners: Major storm could cause Piney Point crisis

MANATEE COUNTY — In a Wednesday meeting with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, the Manatee County Commission stressed that one of its top legislative priorities this year is to ensure the state agency has adequate funding to reduce contaminated water and avert a potential disaster from elevated reservoirs at an abandoned phosphate processing facility.

The commissioners also wanted, and received, assurances that the DEP and the current property owner, HRK Holdings, are not reviving the idea of a deep water injection well — a disposal method that commissioners and area farmers opposed in 2014.

“I’m not into that well stuff,” Commissioner Priscilla Whisenant Trace told them. “It bothers me.”

Commissioners wanted to discuss with DEP how much wastewater from a closed fertilizer plant (what the DEP calls “process water”), combined with contaminated rainfall, remains in the phosphogypsum stacks — mounds of phosphogypsum, a radioactive residue from the processing of phosphate ore.

Commissioners are concerned that a major storm could cause the stacks to overflow into nearby Bishop Harbor and then Tampa Bay, causing fish kills and other environmental damage — which happened in the past.

The water can contain radium, heavy metals, ammonia and phosphorus.

“We don’t have a crisis today,” John Coates, an engineer with DEP’s mining and minerals program, told commissioners.

Even so, the agency needs to “move forward sooner than later” in getting the earthen mounds of contaminated water substantially depleted, he stressed.

So far, DEP has overseen the removal of billions of gallons from the ponds atop the gypsum mounds. As recently as 2014, when the injection well was proposed, the stacks held 1.2 billion gallons.

Currently, about 630 million gallons of wastewater, seawater and rainfall remain in two 70-foot-high reservoirs. Those elevated ponds have enough capacity for 46 inches of rainfall.

“If nothing is done over time, these reservoirs will fill up,” Coates said.

Currently, DEP is using “spray evaporation” to get rid of the remaining water. Spraying the water into the air for it to evaporate is effective, Coates said. The agency is considering ways of enhancing that system.

In the past, DEP has treated water from the stacks with lime and reverse osmosis, then dispersed it by barge in the Gulf of Mexico.

In 2011, the agency authorized an emergency discharge of 169 million gallons into Tampa Bay, most of it seawater that had backed up into the stacks from nearly Bishop Harbor. A leak in the lining of one of the gypsum stacks had to be grouted and repaired by HRK.

In 1965, the Borden Chemical Co. became Port Manatee’s first industrial client by acquiring 670 acres on U.S. 41 for what would become known as the Piney Point Phosphates plant.

The facility went through several ownership changes. Its final operator, Mulberry Corp., went bankrupt and abandoned the property in 2001.

In 2006, HRK Holdings acquired the site from a bankruptcy trustee. It demolished the fertilizer plant and has since sold off parcels to other businesses, such as Air Products, which manufactures liquefied natural gas heat exchangers. HRK is listed on property records as still owning 537 acres.

Coates said it could still take decades to completely drain the elevated ponds and cap then, leaving “a fairly large footprint” for some use.

When that eventually happens, Trace suggested that the high mounds could become a good location for solar energy panels.

A third reservoir contains a mix of rain and seawater. DEP and HRK Holdings are exploring the idea of capping that reservoir with a mix of ash and limestone that would harden. That cap would be covered with an 18 to 24-inch layer of soil. The cover would keep additional rain from getting into the sealed pond. The remaining water underneath would continue to gradually seep into a ditch system.

In 2011, DEP used dredged soil from a berth project at Port Manatee to partially fill that reservoir.