DISASTER

Dumping of polluted wastewater from Piney Point continues, DEP working to treat water

Zac Anderson Jesse Mendoza
Sarasota Herald-Tribune

As wastewater from the old Piney Point fertilizer plant property in Manatee County continued to be pumped out Wednesday at a rate of 38 million gallons a day and dumped into Tampa Bay, state officials announced two companies have been hired to treat the water before discharging.

“The Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) tasked two innovative technology companies to initiate nutrient reduction and removal treatments from water on-site prior to discharging to Port Manatee,” DEP said in a press release that provided no other details on the treatment effort.

Funding for the Piney Point cleanup effort also advanced in the Florida Legislature on Wednesday, work was expected to proceed on patching a leak in a wastewater containment pond liner, DEP announced elevated levels of phosphorus were detected around the discharge site and environmentalists criticized past state oversight efforts.

With engineers determining Tuesday that the immediate crisis of a catastrophic flood inundating nearby properties no longer is a concern, attention now is squarely on DEP efforts to stop the dumping of polluted Piney Point water into Tampa Bay.

There are concerns that the nutrient-rich water will feed algae blooms. The DEP press release said water samples taken around the discharge site at Port Manatee found elevated levels of phosphorus, but that samples taken elsewhere in Tampa Bay “are attaining marine water quality standards.” 

DEP has been discharging the polluted water to alleviate pressure on a breach in the containment pond wall and avert a full collapse of the wall. A leak in the pond liner led to water seeping out of the bottom and forming the breach.

About 480 million gallons were in the containment pond before the crisis began and 258 million gallons remained Wednesday, according to DEP. Roughly 173 million gallons have been discharged into the bay, while some wastewater has been contained on site.

A dive team and remote operated submersible vehicle were scheduled to be deployed to the bottom of the pond Wednesday at 2 p.m. to investigate repairing the liner.

“Our goal is to stop discharging to the bay as soon as possible, as soon as it is structurally sound and safe because we want to minimize the impact to the environment,” said DEP spokeswoman Shannon Herbon. “As soon as our engineers believe that is safe to be done that will happen.”

DEP also is exploring options to store the discharged water so it can be disposed of elsewhere and not dumped into the bay. Manatee County Administrator Scott Hopes has mentioned using barges and storage tanks, but Herbon didn’t have more details on those efforts Wednesday.

“I know they’re looking at pumping water and storing it offsite, again to minimize impact to the bay,” she said.

Even after the wastewater dumping ceases, Piney Point still poses a major environmental threat until the containment ponds are fully drained and the phosphogypsum stacks that the ponds sit on are closed. The cleanup will be a costly process, but state leaders are pushing legislation to use money from the recent $1.9 trillion federal COVID-19 stimulus bill to pay for it.

The state Senate amended the chamber’s budget proposal Wednesday with language aimed at fully funding the Piney Point cleanup, which is estimated to cost $200 million. A state House committee also was slated to discuss Piney Point Wednesday evening.

As DEP coordinated a flurry of activity around the Piney Point site Wednesday, environmental advocates were hopeful the efforts will soon pay off.

Tampa Bay Estuary Program Assistant Director Maya Burke said she is cautiously optimistic that DEP can address the liner problem. She said that the areas that surround the Piney Point discharge are some of the most pristine and less developed areas in the entire watershed.

“It is where our largest field restoration efforts have been targeted,” Burke said.

The Southwest Florida Water Management District SWIM program has done several large scale environmental restoration projects that are in the vicinity of where discharge is occurring.

In response to the ongoing incident at Piney Point, the estuary program is coordinating a group of partners and volunteers who are mobilizing to collect as much data as possible so they can perform a detailed analysis of the effects of wastewater discharges into the bay.

Although most wastewater is being discharged in a controlled manner into Berth 12 at Port Manatee, a significant amount of water was discharged last week into Piney Point Creek and directly out into areas located in the Cockroach Bay Aquatic Preserve. There was between 360,000 and 730,000 gallons of wastewater that spilled from the leak into that area from March 29 and April 3..

The wastewater being spilled is not toxic in a way that would have an immediate impact, but there are concerns about the amount of nutrient-loaded water that is flowing into shallow areas near seagrass beds and the nooks and crannies of the estuaries, where those nutrients could remain for a longer period of time.

“I know a lot of folks are focused on red tide, but we are actually more focused on macro algae. That is your big algae species,” Burke said. “That could potentially shade out and outcompete seagrass, so then you lose habitat that fish rely on. If you lose that habitat then the fish will all clear, and so that has a cascading effect.”

That part of that bay near Piney Point also has rocky habitat where sponges and soft coral can attach. That habitat is a “rest over step” between the estuaries, nurseries and sea grass beds, and the deeper waters of the Gulf of Mexico, and is a place where reef fish can be found.

“We see reef fish that you don’t see in other areas of Tampa Bay,” Burke said. “That is a concern for us.”

Burke said environmental stakeholders are preparing for “more of a marathon than a sprint,” since the long-term effects of the Piney Point wastewater incident will take time to develop.

“So what the (estuary program) is doing is working with all of our partners, and frankly anybody who is qualified, that has been offering us volunteer support,” Burke said. “We are coordinating that all so that we have long-term event monitoring going on, so we can characterize water quality, sea grass, macro algae, benthic conditions, fish response and things like that.”

Other environmental groups lashed out at DEP Wednesday, accusing the agency of oversight failures at Piney Point that contributed to the facility’s latest dumping of polluted wastewater, which the groups say has 10 times more algae-feeding nitrogen than raw sewage.

The joint statement by Suncoast Waterkeeper and Tampa Bay Waterkeeper says “the current failure at the Piney Point facility owned by HRK was preventable” and alleges that DEP “knew of the failures of the liner not only at Piney Point but other phosphogypsum stacks.”

More Piney Point:What you need to know on Wednesday, April 7 about Florida wastewater leak

The failure of a heavy duty plastic liner under a wastewater containment pond that sits atop an old phosphogypsum stack led to polluted wastewater leaking from the bottom, causing a breach in the stack, which serves as a wall around the containment pond.

Polluted water began seeping out of the breach. Under an emergency order last week DEP authorized the discharge millions of gallons of the wastewater into Tampa Bay to drain the containment pond and alleviate pressure on the breach.

The environmental groups said DEP let the pond get too full.

“The current status of the site (before the failure that caused the uncontrolled release) would have only allowed for 9.7 inches of rainfall before a breach,” the news release states, adding: “FDEP from 2007 to present allowed water levels to increase from a near empty cell (with 1.3 billion gallons of lined storage available in closed reservoirs) to over 700 million gallons of water and dredged material. 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.”

And while officials have played down the dangers from the wastewater, stating it does not contain toxic substances, the environmental groups said its potential environmental impact still is substantial.

Wastewater dumping:Piney Point waters may fuel harmful algae bloom along Southwest Florida coast

“At the current rate of wastewater discharge nearly 500 tons of nitrogen are on track to be released in the course of about a week,” the news release states. “This is equivalent to approximately 100,000 bags of fertilizer.”

The groups went on to call for a statewide commission on phosphogypsum stack operations and closure and other measures to clean up Piney Point and prevent future disasters.

Phosphogypsum stacks in Florida:What are they and where are they located?

Phosphogypsum stacks are piles of waste material left over from the process of turning phosphate rock, which is mined in Florida, into fertilizer. There are a number of such “gypstacks” around Florida, and environmental advocates worry that many are ticking time bombs that could unleash more environmental damage.

Please follow Herald-Tribune Political Editor Zac Anderson on Twitter at @zacjanderson. He can be reached at zac.anderson@heraldtribune.com