PALMETTO – The wastewater discharge into Tampa Bay from a breached Piney Point retention pond near Port Manatee stopped Friday, April 9, but concerns are growing regarding the potential environmental impacts to Tampa Bay and other area waterways.
“We’re already seeing signs of an algae bloom in that area, captured through satellite imagery,” Sarasota Bay Estuary Program (SBEP) Executive Director Dave Tomasko told Holmes Beach Mayor Judy Titsworth in an email last week. “There does appear to be an algae bloom about 10 square miles in size and it’s centered around Piney Point. We just don’t know where it’ll go, how big it will get and how long it will last.”
On Thursday, April 8, the Anna Maria and Bradenton Beach city commissions declared preemptive local states of emergency in anticipation of potential environmental impacts of the Piney Point discharge, which occurred less than 20 miles from Anna Maria Island. The city of Holmes Beach is expected to enact a similar declaration this week.
Last week, city, state and federal officials continued their response to the breached Piney Point phosphogypsum stack, which contains a retention pond that until recently held approximately 480 million gallons of water containing high levels of phosphorus and nitrate.
Formerly the site of a phosphate plant that first opened in 1966, Piney Point was purchased by HRK Holdings in 2006. In addition to the retention pond, the property also contains two additional compartments that contain 400 million gallons of more heavily polluted water.
The long-term plan is to treat the remaining water and build a nearby deep water injection well that in a few years will be used to inject the treated water deep into the Earth.
According to the Sunday, April 11 FDEP update on Piney Point, “Yesterday, 217 million gallons remained in the NGS-South compartment (the breached containment pond). The site received 0.6 inches of rain, thus increasing the volume in the compartment to 221 million gallons.”
According to the Saturday, April 10 update, “DEP deployed diving companies and submersible cameras that identified a seam separation on the east wall of the NGS-South. Dive operations have strategically placed a steel plate on the seam separation to temporarily repair this identified source of concentrated seepage. To date, 215 million gallons were discharged to the port.”
During a Tuesday, April 6 press conference, acting County Administrator Scott Hopes said,
“This is very much under control now. The risk has been lessened to the point that people will be able to return to their homes.”
Environmental concerns
The SBEP, Suncoast Waterkeeper and Tampa Bay Waterkeeper are among the organizations monitoring the potential environmental impacts.
“We are in the early stages of this, but it has the potential to be the worst environmental impact to our local waters in my career, which dates back to the 1980s,” SBEP’s Tomasko wrote Titsworth. “Early model runs suggest that over the next few days to weeks, the waters being discharged will make their way down along the southern shoreline of Tampa Bay and it is expected to enter into Terra Ceia Bay, the Manatee River, northern Anna Maria Sound and even Palma Sola Bay,” he wrote.
“Preliminary data from the discharges has given us nitrogen concentrations that are about 100 times as concentrated as urban stormwater runoff and about 10 times as concentrated as raw sewage. Just in the first few days, the load of nitrogen to the bay was equivalent to about 40,000 bags of fertilizer,” Tomasko wrote.
When contacted Saturday, Tomasko said the fertilizer equivalency was now closer to 70,000 bags of fertilizer.
Tomasko said he’s more concerned about other forms of algae blooms than he is about a potential red tide outbreak at this time. He said the algae blooms he’s most concerned about impact water clarity and water quality and could potentially lead to more manatee deaths and the potential loss of fishing habitats.
On April 7, the Suncoast and Tampa Bay Waterkeeper organizations issued a joint statement that in part said, “The current discharge of water is far exceeding water quality standards for the Tampa Bay Estuary and delivering excess nitrogen and phosphorus to bay waters. Both nutrients are known to fuel harmful algae blooms such as red tides. This disaster was preventable. Permit conditions were ignored, water accumulation was not addressed when state funds were available to remedy the conditions.”
FDEP updates and water quality sampling data can be found online.
State committee meeting
On Wednesday, April 7, FDEP Secretary Noah Valenstein appeared before the Florida House of Representatives’ Pandemics and Public Emergencies Committee to discuss Piney Point. He participated via web conferencing from the Emergency Operations Center in Bradenton and Hopes traveled to Tallahassee in person.
Regarding FDEP’s initial response, Valenstein said, “The department immediately set up intense monitoring for nearby freshwater bodies as well as Tampa Bay. That allowed us to have a very detailed baseline of water quality in the area to ensure that we can hold HRK fully accountable for any impact to our resources.”
In regard to holding HRK responsible, Valenstein said, “We are actively looking at our litigation options.”
When asked what lessons can be learned from the Piney Point crisis, Valenstein said, “Piney Point has a history as a legacy site of the state recognizing that it needs to come in, and that it’s the party with the funds to clean the site up. There’s always been sort of a partial clean-up, but not closure by the state. The first lesson is when you have the opportunity you need to close the site. This legislature, this department and this administration has the opportunity to make the decision to close the site fully and be done with it, as opposed to a partial closure and possible reinvention of the site with continued risk.”
Hopes shared a less optimistic view and said, “It’s unlikely a company like this has not structured themselves in a way that with Chapter 11 and Chapter 7 (bankruptcy) it’s going to be very difficult,” he said. “In the meantime, we have to be the parties that solve this problem permanently.”
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