MANATEE COUNTY (WSNN) – A phosphogypsum stack at Piney Point in Manatee County is causing some major problems, and environmental activists say they are not happy.
Up to 480 million gallons of toxic wastewater could end up in Tampa Bay from Port Manatee after a leak from a phosphogypsum stack at Piney Point.
The Florida Department of Environmental Protection gave permission to the local company managing the stack to discharge this wastewater to prevent something even worse from happening.
Glenn Compton the director of Manasota 88, non-profit public health and environmental organization says he saw this coming.
“There’s really no good solution to this problem,” Compton said. “There’s no best-case scenario here. It’s trying to avoid the worst-case scenario. Which are a collapse of the dikes and total annihilation of everything downstream from the receiving end to the reading waters if the phosphogypsum stack fails.
Compton says what may have seemed like a good thing, in the beginning, could just be a huge cost to taxpayers in the end.
FDEP says the wastewater is acidic and could contain excess total ammonia nitrogen and could contain heavy metals.
