FERTILIZER
are growing more severe as the Earth warms.
One swath of the state is particularly vulnerable. Three central Florida ZIP codes located in the towns of Mulberry, Bartow and Fort Meade carry most of the burden of phosphate mining waste, with the highest concentration of gypstacks, according to an analysis of public records. Twenty-five phosphogypsum stacks rise across the state, according to Florida Department of Environmental Protection data, ranging anywhere from 51 to 744 acres in area. Most are concentrated in central Florida.
In other parts of the southeast, two stacks are under federal Environmental Protection Agency oversight as Superfund sites on the coast of Mississippi in Pascagoula. Other stacks, including those that hold waste from three phosphate processing facilities, rise in Louisiana.
RISING STACKS, DESPITE COMMUNITY CONCERNS
Forty years ago, Progress Village residents packed the seats of a 1983 Hillsborough County Commission meeting to protest a permit to build a second stack. That stack is now easily visible from the playgrounds of the local elementary and middle schools.
When it was approved, some thought the community concern fell on deaf ears because of racism. “I don’t think if this site was located near an established community that was 99.8 percent white … that this company would have proposed to put this pile on that site,” Warren Dawson, the Village’s attorney at the time, said in a 1984 Miami Herald article.
As local will to fight the stack dwindled, the stack itself grew taller. The commission later quietly granted both 200-foot and 50-foot height extensions with little input from community members, according to a 2017 University of South Florida thesis by Laura Baum, who spent three years in the community documenting the Village’s story.
Several current residents from the Village and nearby town of Riverview interviewed for this project said they had never thought about what the mountain they lived next to could be.
In 1984, Village leaders came to an agreement with the company known as Gardinier, which was soon renamed Cargill. In 2004, Cargill’s crop nutrition division and IMC Global merged to become The Mosaic Co. (NYSE: MOS), a Fortune 500 company with nearly $20 billion in revenue in 2022. Based in Tampa and with major phosphate operations in Florida and Louisiana, Mosaic is today one of North America’s “Big Three” fertilizer manufacturers following CF Industries and Nutrien.
In exchange for putting up with the new gypstack, the agreement gave Progress
Village residents land for a community garden, preferential hiring for locals at the nearby phosphate operations and an ongoing scholarship program, which still actively benefits local students. Cargill also reimbursed attorney fees spent to fight the stack.
The agreement set up honor roll awards of $25 per report card for local students, and a $100 gift upon graduation.
“Progress Village was strong and organized,” Baum said. “They really worked hard to have their community organization and be powerful within it.
That’s the only way they were able to force the agreement.”
TAXPAYERS STUCK WITH HIGH COSTS OF CLOSURE
A history of gypsum stack threats across the southeast have legitimized the initial fears of Village residents.
FDEP maintains a public database of communications between the agency and facility managers about potential spills or threats to industry infrastructure. Activists keep a close eye on the list, especially during hurricanes.
Many Floridians may have never heard of a gypsum stack until spring 2021. More than 300 homes were evacuated when officials in late March discovered a tear in the liner of a stack at
Piney Point. Officials released more than 200 million gallons of polluted water into Port Manatee and Tampa Bay to avoid a worse disaster.
Two years later, Florida taxpayers have spent $85 million cleaning up the site. A court-appointed engineer is overseeing its closure. Workers are injecting a million gallons of its polluted water every day more than a half mile below ground, in a confined saltwater aquifer.
Tampa Bay saw its worst red tide in half a century the summer following the release; although some scientific studies point to Piney Point as the cause, other research is ongoing.
Meanwhile, milliongallon
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discharges into southeastern watersheds have happened for decades.
Most stacks are now managed by bigger fertilizer companies like Nutrien and Mosaic. This doesn’t include the two in southwest Mississippi that became Superfund sites when the EPA intervened in 2018.
Costs for the Mississippi sites have soared to
$198.6 million — $95 million for stack closure and $103 million for water treatment, said Craig Zeller, an EPA remedial project manager. The project, he added, will likely be completed in 2025.
The agency lists heavy hurricane rainfall as the reason for the Mississippi discharge of 400 million gallons of partially treated waste in 2017. As of March, 5.4 billion gallons of water have been discharged into the Bayou Cossette over five years, according to EPA documents.
DRINKING WATER WORRIES
Phosphogypsum stacks also pose a threat for the Floridan Aquifer, the primary source of drinking water for Floridians.
Smith worries a disaster like Piney Point could be in the Village’s future, even though the stack is now under the watch of well-financed Mosaic. Many residents have long been wary of their water, coming to a consensus it isn’t safe to drink or cook with. Growing up, Progress
Village Civic Council President Twanda Bradley said her family used a water purifier out of caution.
“It would be yellowish, kind of beige,” Bradley said of the community tap water in her childhood. “It wasn’t clear.”
Development on the surface can increase the aquifer’s vulnerability to sinkholes. Six years ago, a sinkhole opened up under an active gypstack at Mosaic’s New Wales facility in Mulberry. An estimated 215 million gallons of toxic wastewater leaked into the aquifer.
And that wasn’t the first time. Sinkholes triggered an 80-million-gallon spill at the New Wales gypstack in 1994, and an 84-million-gallon release in 2009 at a gypstack in White Springs, according to an E&E News report.
In the future, such disasters could be amplified by two factors: aging infrastructure and the reality of climate change, which scientists say is causing more-extreme precipitation and strengthening some hurricanes.
Storm wind speeds are expected to increase in intensity by up to 10% in the 21st century, according to model projections from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Precipitation rates may grow 10% to 15%; warmer temperatures mean the atmosphere holds more water, leading to more rain.
And while preseason forecasts predict an average number of storms,
Ragan Whitlock, a staff attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity