Around 11 a.m. on April 3, an emergency alert flashed on residents’ cell phones in Manatee County, Florida. “Evacuate area NOW,” it read, according to a screenshot later published by the Tampa Bay Times. “Collapse of Piney Point Stack imminent!”

Three weeks later, the details of that emergency have become clear. On March 26, a leak sprung at Piney Point, a phosphate mine and fertilizer plant that’s been defunct since 2001. The facility—one of more than two dozen in the state, nine of which are still active—houses stacks of phosphogypsum, a toxic, radioactive byproduct of the fertilizer production process. These flat, white, mesa-like “gypstacks” of accumulated solid waste, which can stretch up to five stories tall, then become crudely efficient containment ponds for liquid waste.

A new investigation by the Tampa Bay Times shows how a well-documented combination of ineptitude, short-sightedness, and greed led to the current debacle at Piney Point. When the site’s current owner, private investment company HRK Holdings, expressed (financial) interest in adding waste from a Port Manatee dredging project to Piney Point’s gypstacks, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers warned that the project might come with unacceptable risk. This advice was dismissed—leading to an almost immediate failure of the plastic lining of Piney Point’s reservoir. A sequence of fixes never resolved the problem, according to the Times. As recently as March 2020, an independent engineering firm hired to evaluate the site found an imminent danger of “catastrophic damage to the public and the environment” due to the “unknown and likely compromised condition” of the liner.

Read the full article about the wastewater disaster in Florida by Lela Nargi at The Counter.