Florida officials ordered more than 300 homes to be evacuated and closed off a highway near the large reservoir in the Tampa Bay area on the north of Bradenton.
Those citizens, who reside by the Piney Point reservoir received an alert via text message, saying to leave the area immediately due to the “imminent” collapse. The necessary evacuation area was then expanded in order to include more homes, yet no shelters are being planned to open.
According to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, a break was detected on Friday in one of the walls of a 77-acre pond that has a depth of 25 feet and holds millions of gallons of aqueous mixture, containing phosphorus and nitrogen from an old phosphate plant.
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Officials supplied rocks and materials to plug the hole in the pond, however, their efforts were not successful.
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Scott Hopes, Manatee County Administrator, reported to the press that the most concerning issue here is that the water could flood the area, which is mostly used for agriculture and thus is low in population density:
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"We are talking about the potential of about 600 million gallons within a matter of seconds and minutes leaving that retention pool and going around the surrounding area.”
Workers have been working on bringing the volume down for the pond not to burst. Pumping the entire pond would take 10 to 12 days. Others have been working to chart the path to control the water from the pond into the Tampa Bay. DeSantis' declaration of a state of emergency supplies additional pumps and cranes to the area.
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The leaking pond is located at the old Piney Point phosphate mine, sitting in a stack of phosphogypsum, which is a waste product from manufacturing fertilizer that is radioactive. It contains small amounts of naturally occurring radium and uranium, and the stacks can also release large concentrations of radon gas.
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Importantly, Scott Hopes informed the press that in case the pond collapses, there is a risk it could destabilize the walls of other areas in the plant:
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"The pond is basically salt water. We saw ducks yesterday, there are snooks swimming in there. It's sustaining wildlife. That's not the case for the other two pools.”
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According to the executive order that declares the state of emergency, the breached structure contains 480 million gallons of seawater mixed with process water and the embankment materials from the old fertilizer manufacturing plant.
Nikki Fried, an agriculture Commissioner, wrote a letter to the governor, asking to convene an emergency session of the state cabinet to discuss a plan of actions: "The immediate evacuation of residents, disruption of families during Easter weekend, and potential environmental catastrophe requires the attention and action of Florida's state-wide elected leadership.”
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Back in 2016, more than 200 million gallons of contaminated wastewater from another fertilizer plant in central Florida leaked into one of the state's main aquifers after a massive sinkhole opened up in a pond of a phosphogypsum stack.
There are about 70 gypsum stacks in the United States, including 27 in Florida, mostly in the west-central region. The wastewater stored in the gypsum stacks can't be seen from the ground, because the piles surrounding the structure can go as high as 500 feet.
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