Many are worried as polluted water drains into main aquifer
MULBERRY — Neighbors of an unplugged sinkhole sending contaminated water and fertilizer plant waste cascading into Florida’s main drinking-water aquifer are fearful, and fuming that it took three weeks for them to be notified about the disaster.
Many are still waiting anxiously for results from tests for radiation and toxic chemicals in their wells.
So far, more than 200 million gallons of tainted water has drained from a waste heap through a 45-foot-wide hole into the Floridan aquifer, which provides water to millions of people.
The Mosaic Co. — one of the world’s largest producers of phosphate and pot- ash for fertilizer — acknowledged Wednesday that the contamination had spread to groundwater around the sinkhole.
On Thursday, company spokeswoman Jackie Barron said the acidity and sulphates were found in a recovery well being used to pull water out within a quarter mile of the sinkhole.
The day before, she said that traces had shown up in several wells on the site, but on Thursday, she said contamination was found only at the recovery well, and that no contamination has been found in the monitoring wells farther from the hole, nor beyond the limits of the company’s property.
A Mosaic employee discovered the water loss caused by the sinkhole Aug. 27 and the state and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was notified the next day, as required by Florida law, according to David Jellerson, the company’s senior director for environmental and phosphate projects.
However, homeowners near Mosaic’s New Wales plant weren’t first notified by Mosaic or DEP until Sept. 19, after news of the sinkhole broke the previous week. Only then did Mosaic begin providing them with bottled water.
By then, a huge wastewater pond had mostly disappeared through the hole in the massive pile of phosphogypsum, a fertilizer byproduc t that contains minute traces of radiation.
Mosaic stacks it in hill-size piles that can be hundreds of feet tall and visible from space.
Because it is radioactive, the material can’t be reused, but the wastewater involved is stored in ponds atop the piles.
Aerial photos and video shot by The Associated Press on Thursday show the water is still flowing down into the aqui fe r, which s t re tc hes beneath Florida and southern Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina.
Mosaic also acknowledged that it doesn’t really know how deep the hole has grown between the huge radioactive waste pile and the vast aquifer below. Barron said the company believes it’s 300 feet deep. and walking around Wellington, Strauss was known by a different moniker on the other side of the country.
She lived in Los Angeles for years, where she was known as the “Lava Lady,” among the locals. Lifelong Los Angeles resident Rick Castro first saw her in the ’80s and immediately became enamored with her style.
Much like the Wellington residents here, Castro said everyone in the Hollywood, Calif., area saw her and had similar stories and interest. He likes to think he got to know her a bit, but admitted she was a “solitary soul” and “preferred privac y,” Castro said.
Castro said she would walk