Piney Point indicative of state’s environmental oversight failures, critics say

The state agency tasked with cleaning up the environmental disaster at Piney Point contributed to many of the problems at the site, critics say, raising questions about the effectiveness of Florida’s environmental regulations.

The Florida Department of Environmental Protection on Friday stopped the flow of untreated wastewater from Piney Point into Tampa Bay and is working to implement a long-term solution, while also pledging to hold property owner HRK Holdings responsible for the disaster.

Yet it was DEP’s own decisions that helped push the problems at the former fertilizer plant property to another breaking point, according to some environmental advocates and public officials.

A DEP contractor installed the wastewater containment pond liner that recently failed for a second time. DEP also allowed the problematic wastewater pond to be refilled after it had nearly been drained. And DEP left the property in private hands when it could have closed the site completely years ago, something the agency’s head recently implied was a mistake.

The implications of DEP’s alleged failures go beyond Piney Point, calling into question whether Florida officials are doing enough to properly police similar industrial sites around the state to avert similar disasters in the future.

Environmental advocates have long accused DEP and elected officials of failing to adequately protect Florida’s fragile ecosystems, and Piney Point may be a prime example.

“I know there is a lot of focus on HRK,” said former Manatee County Commissioner Joe McClash. “It is not as clear as pinning everything on HRK; I resent the targeting of HRK as being the sole person responsible for this. It was, in my opinion, squarely on the shoulders of the DEP and the governor, as the executive.”

DEP has an extensive history with Piney Point as the state agency that oversees and grants permits for construction and operations at such facilities.

The agency became even more intimately involved when it took over operations at Piney Point in 2001 after the Mulberry Corporation filed for bankruptcy. DEP continued to oversee efforts to remediate the site and repurpose it for “beneficial public use” through an agreement with HRK, which purchased the property out of bankruptcy in August 2006.

Speaking before a state House committee Wednesday, DEP Secretary Noah Valenstein seemed to acknowledge that the DEP failed at Piney Point in at least one key respect, saying the “most important lesson” to learn from the disaster is the state should permanently close such sites when it gets the chance.

Yet Valenstein also was adamant that Piney Point is a unique situation when he was pressed by lawmakers about other potential environmental threats looming around the state. DEP did not respond to multiple requests for comment last week on the agency’s actions at Piney Point.

Glenn Compton, chairman of the environmental group ManaSota-88, has advocated for the complete closure of the Piney Point property for decades. He said the agency needs to take a harder look at its own failures at Piney Point and put new regulations in place on phosphate mining and processing statewide.

“The mismanagement that has taken place over decades indicates that the DEP needs to be doing a much better job than they are, and we would hope that new regulations are proposed that would prevent such catastrophic events from happening again in the future,” Compton said.

DEP’S own liner leaking again

The Piney Point fertilizer plant opened in 1966 and the state has long been involved in overseeing it, but DEP’s involvement ramped up considerably in 2001 after Mulberry went bankrupt.

DEP took over day-to-day operations. The agency’s contractors installed a polyethylene liner in a wastewater containment pond atop the phosphogypsum stacks – large piles of waste from the phosphate mining and fertilizer production process – in the mid-2000s that has been the source of repeated problems.

Crews currently are working day and night to stop a leak in the liner, and it’s not the first leak. Another incident in 2011 led to about 169 million gallons of wastewater being dumped into Bishop Harbor.

Valenstein acknowledged that the liner needs to be scrutinized, and that the DEP should question its own engineering standards.

“I think questions such as: ‘Do we have the right engineering standards; what lesson will we learn from the liner?’” Valenstein said. “Does its specs actually live up to what is advertised in the State of Florida? Do we need to look at that?”

Yet even as DEP works to fix the short-term problem, local and state authorities are calling for a long-term solution, one that some believe DEP waited far too long to address.

“It’s been interesting to hear local and state politicians who likely only recently heard the term phosphogypsum, say that this problem has been kicked down the road for decades and it’s time to do something about it,” Compton said.

DEP missed an opportunity to close Piney Point down in 2001 when the agency took over operations. The agency began efforts to close the site by treating and disposing of 2.35 billion gallons of wastewater, and installing the liner system to keep rainwater and other liquids from coming into direct contact with the phosphogypsum stacks.

Yet after HRK purchased the site out of bankruptcy in August 2006, DEP agreed to the company’s efforts to repurpose the site for “beneficial use” as a disposal property for industrial waste.

“The idea was that we were literally developing a heavy industrial site before we had any clients,” Piney Point site manager Jeff Barrath told Manatee County commissioners during a Feb. 2 meeting. “That was the department’s long-term vision of this site, I believe as it pertains to a beneficial positive public reuse of the facility.”

The property is “676 acres directly across the street from the port, zoned heavy industrial with 7.3 miles of existing rail on site, where we had the (DEP) during their closure efforts literally construct all of the safeguard measures for an industrial site,” Barrath said at the meeting. “That was HRK’s entire concept coming out of the gates.”

Rather than close Piney Point, DEP allowed a new chapter to begin. It didn’t go well.

Piney Point becomes dredging disposal site

In the mid-2000s, Manatee County commissioners, acting as the Manatee County Port Authority, were looking for suitable locations to dispose of dredging materials from the port’s Berth 12 expansion.

The dredging project widened the berth in anticipation of the Panama Canal expansion to give post-Panamax vessels a place to dock in the region. HRK was looking for dredging clients to fill the newly lined, landfill-grade compartments at Piney Point.

Piney Point has long held a symbiotic relationship with Port Manatee, and in 2007 the Port Authority agreed to a contract with HRK to dispose of dredging material from Berth 12 at the company’s property.

That project was permitted by the DEP and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, but since then, the liners installed by DEP contractors have failed at least twice.

McClash said the dredging disposal was not handled appropriately, and that HRK was expected to drain water from dredging material and return it to the bay – which he said is standard practice in dredge material disposal.

“Several presentations were made; this went on for probably two years, maybe more, of deciding how to handle the dredge material from Berth 12,” McClash said. “Their plan was not to have water accumulate. That was why the decision was supported, because we saw this as an opportunity for a beneficial use of that cell since it was lined to landfill standards.”

Yet Compton and others believe such projects never should have happened, and that the reinvention of Piney Point was ill advised.

Prior to the Berth 12 project, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers also raised red flags about the proposal. The Corps, in 2009, expressed concerns about liability if HRK went bankrupt, the potential environmental consequences, and an incomplete engineering risk assessment by a third party, according to Corps documents.

Soon after dredging started in April 2011, a tear in the liner of the southern containment pond caused a leak, and eventual controlled breach, that sent about 169 million gallons of dredge slurry out into Bishop Harbor.

Once enough water was drained, the liner was repaired, and DEP allowed dredging to continue as planned. McClash said the first leak should have been a major red flag, and he said he later found out that the DEP never disclosed information about failures at other locations that used the same type of liner.

“That liner was already leaking at other phosphogypsum stacks; they did not disclose to HRK, if you look at that complaint that HRK filed,” McClash said. “They never disclosed that to Port Manatee or to Manatee County.”

“We started dredging, liner rips, failure and 169 million gallons of dredge water released into” Bishop Harbor in 2011, McClash said. “That would have been a big red flag right there.”

Slower than the rain

That spill cost HRK significantly, draining the company’s capital, and in 2012 the company filed for bankruptcy. Since then, DEP and Manatee County officials have wrestled with questions about how to dispose of the remaining water.

The search for solutions stalled in 2014, however, after proposals supported by the DEP, HRK and several Manatee County commissioners to build a deep injection well met heavy opposition from the agricultural community. In the aftermath, there’s been little substantial effort made toward permanently closing the site, and rainwater continued to collect and rise at Piney Point.

The DEP “from 2007 to present allowed water levels to increase from a near empty cell to over 700 million gallons of water and dredged material,” according to a joint statement by the Suncoast Waterkeeper and Tampa Bay Waterkeeper boards. “FDEP failed to provide the resources needed to remove the water from the stacks at the site and knew as early as 2013 about the need to remove water from the stacks.”

This year – about nine years after HRK filed for bankruptcy – Manatee County made disposing of wastewater at Piney Point its top legislative priority.

That effort led Manatee County to pledge $6 million to match a $6 million appropriations bill in the state Legislature to fund wastewater removal at Piney Point. On March 9 the commission voted to support construction of a deep injection well – a two- to three-year project – that was estimated to cost about $15 million overall.

Those plans were dramatically interrupted on April 1, when Barrath, county staff and other engineers sounded the alarm at a Manatee County Commission meeting about a leak in the southern pond at Piney Point.

Since then, officials have released roughly 215 million gallons of wastewater into Tampa Bay to avert a full collapse of the earthen wall surrounding the leaking wastewater containment pond, the same pond that, according to DEP records, contains the Berth 12 dredging material and rainwater.

Now, with an estimated cost upwards of $200 million, the state has an opportunity to finally close the book on Piney Point, Valenstein said.

“This Legislature, certainly this department and this administration, has the opportunity to be the one to make that decision to close the site fully and be done with it,” Valenstein said. “I think that is clearly the most important lesson to learn.”