Florida is on the brink of ecological disaster.
The governor of this American state, Ron DeSantis, visited the site of a wastewater tank threatening to rupture on Sunday April 5.
Its rupture would cause immense flooding and significant environmental damage to the fragile Tampa Bay.
More than 300 homes have been ordered to evacuate in this area, south of the large city of Tampa.
A state of emergency has been declared in order to allocate new funds to face this potential crisis on the industrial site of Piney Point, a former factory of phosphate, compound used for the production of fertilizers.
The plastic coating of this reservoir, containing more than a million cubic meters of wastewater, from dredging or rainwater in particular, began to leak several days ago.
“If we were to see a complete rupture, within minutes about 340 million gallons [over a million cubic meters of water] could spill out,” said Scott Hopes, a Manatee County official.
According to him, the models show that such a rupture would result in a "water wall" 6 meters high.
The authorities tried unsuccessfully to plug the leak, and have now been pumping water out of the reservoir since last week to reduce the pressure there, at the rate of more than 100,000 cubic meters per day.
Concern around phosphogypsum contamination
This water "is not radioactive", reassured the governor, who asked the company managing the site, HHK Holdings, to account.
He assured that the water had been tested before being discharged and was mainly composed of "saline water".
It "meets the quality standards for marine water, with the exception of phosphorus and nitrogen", and nutrients, he said.
But some have expressed concern that these nutrients may help the development of a phenomenon known in this region of the Gulf of Mexico, a "red tide", an algal bloom giving the water a red appearance and threatening to suffocate. marine life.
Concerns also center around stocks of phosphogypsum on the spot, a by-product from the manufacture of fertilizers and considered to be weakly radioactive.
These large piles of phosphogypsum threaten to be washed away in the event of a flood, and therefore to contaminate the surrounding ecosystem.
Frequent incidents
"Federal officials must clean up this waste that the fertilizer industry has thrown on communities in Florida, and immediately stop the production of phosphogypsum," said Jaclyn Lopez, Florida manager of the environmental organization Center for Biological Diversity.
She called on the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to intervene.
Florida agriculture official Nicole Fried wrote to the governor, saying the ongoing crisis was only the latest to affect the site.
"For more than fifty years, this central Florida mining operation has caused numerous environmental and public health disasters and incidents," she wrote, adding that the reservoir lining had already failed several times by the past.
With AFP
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