EDITORIAL: Piney Point must be a wake-up call for FL politicians

Sarasota Herald-Tribune Editorial Board

The shoreline along Tampa Bay, just north of Port Manatee and Piney Point. Millions of gallons of wastewater are being pumped into Tampa Bay at Port Manatee in an effort to avoid a catastrophic failure of a containment wall at Piney Point.

It is truly an indictment of how Florida is led that in a state where countless lawmakers have no qualms about heavy-handedly trying to control and micromanage how Floridians express their right to protest, cast votes and even select which college degrees to pursue, there has been an utter lack of diligent leadership when it comes to protecting citizens from incidents such as the frightening breach at the old Piney Point fertilizer plant in Manatee County.

More:Evacuation notice near Piney Point due to concerns of uncontrolled wastewater release

A leak in a liner of the plant’s reservoir caused a partial breach in a containment wall – which in turn:

Forced hundreds of nearby homes, businesses and Manatee County Jail inmates to be evacuated.
Led to a temporary closure of U.S. Highway 41, a major transportation artery.
Spurred Gov. Ron DeSantis to declare a state of emergency.
Sparked genuine fears that a complete breach in the containment wall could cause a deluge of water as high as 20 feet to overwhelm the surrounding area.

Fortunately, local and state officials suggested Tuesday that the risk of a larger breach had greatly decreased – and that crews could largely focus on containing the current damage and hurriedly pumping wastewater out of the affected area to relieve the pressure on it.

But those encouraging developments don’t change the fact that what took place in Manatee County over the past several days was a full-blown crisis that may have only barely escaped morphing into a clear-cut catastrophe.

Nor do they change the fact that this troubling near-calamity is a product of the chronic failure of elected officials across Florida – and particularly lawmakers in the Legislature – to address longstanding questions about environmentally dubious sites like Piney Point.

More:Accountability a looming question with Piney Point leak, Tampa Bay wastewater discharge

It is damning that after taking an aerial tour of the besieged site earlier this week, U.S. Rep. Vern Buchanan acknowledged that the issues with Piney Point were “something that, unfortunately, could have been dealt with probably over the years.”

But it is infuriating, as well.

And it is galling that environmental hotspots like Piney Point have been allowed to remain problems that haven’t been “dealt with” by our lawmakers in Tallahassee – simply because they have consistently shown little interest in aggressively addressing those problems.

We should continue to hope that the drama at Piney Point will merely remain a close call for both our area and our state. But we should also demand that it serve as a wake-up call – and a pretty jarring one – for Florida’s lawmakers.