Federal suit over 'slightly radioactive' water seeping into aquifer

UPDATE: Some 5,000 people who live near a massive sinkhole that drained "slightly radioactive" wastewater into the underlying aquifer are eligible to join a proposed class-action lawsuit filed in federal court last week.

The suit, filed by the Morgan and Morgan firm of Florida and Weitz & Luxenberg of New York, alleges the Mosaic phosphate company's "conscious actions and omissions disregarded foreseeable risks to human health and safety and to the environment," the Associated Press reports.

On Friday, officials from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency made their first visit to the site, almost a month after a storage pond at a phosphate facility 100 miles north of Lee County began leaking more than 200 million gallons of contaminated water into the Floridan aquifer, one of the one of the state's main underground sources of drinking water.

Mosaic discovered the leak Aug. 27, but waited almost three weeks to notify the public, although it told government agencies earlier.

Though it wasn't legally bound to do so, Walt Precourt, the compan's senior vice president of phosphates said in a statement "We realize we could have done a better job in providing timely information to our neighbors and the broader community. I regret and apologize for not providing information sooner, and am committed to providing regular updates to the public as we move forward. As new information is available, we will be posting it on our website, and providing continued updates to regulators, the press, our local community, and most importantly our neighbors."

Calling it a "water loss incident," Mosaic, the world's largest supplier of phosphate, said the 45 foot-wide chasm opened up beneath a pile of waste material called a gypsum stack, which then tore through the liner, draining the 215-million gallon storage pond that sat atop it.

"It went directly into the Floridan aquifer," said Debbie Waters, Mosaic’s director of regulatory affairs

Mosaic says it's monitoring groundwater and has found no offsite impacts. "Groundwater moves very slowly," said David Jellerson, Mosaic's senior director for environmental and phosphate projects. "There's absolutely nobody at risk."

The company's assurances notwithstanding, many Southwest Florida residents get nervous when "radioactive" and "drinking water" are used in the same sentence. The Floridan aquifer into which the wastewater leaked supplies Cape Coral, Lee County's largest city, as well as thousands of other homes throughout the region.

Quipped Cape Coral businesswoman Julia Davis, " 'Slightly radioactive' reminds me of the phrase, 'a little pregnant.' "

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Questions remain about exactly what "slightly" radioactive means. Is the waste as radioactive as a banana? Raw gold? Mosaic officials hesitated to specific.

"A way to describe the radioactivity in the processed water and our gypsum is that it's a low level of naturally occurring radioactivity," said Waters. "The ore we mine out of  the ground contains uranium and all the uranium products naturally that are there...But it's still present and it's detectable... Primarily, radium sulfate is the form of the radioactive material that is most expected to be in the gypsum," she said.

As for the quantity of radium sulfate? "I could give you a number but it'd be meaningless by itself," Waters said. (But just in case you want to know, the Florida Industrial and Phosphate Research Institute reports phosphogypsum from central Florida contains roughly 20-35 picocuries per gram of radium.)

Mosaic began diverting the pond water into an alternate holding area to reduce the amount of drainage when the problem was first detected. The company said it has been recovering the water by pumping through onsite production wells, though the sinkhole remains open and the gypsum stack is still leaking water into the aquifer, said Waters.

However, she's confident contaminated water will never reach Southwest Florida. "The contaminants including the radioactive materials settle out readily... They don't travel. They're solid materials; they're not in a solution. So they're not migrating in the water through the aquifer (however) the constituents of sodium and sulfate, which are ions and not molecules, do travel more readily and those are things we would be able to detect if they were to show up in our monitoring wells."

Even if contamination was on the move, it wouldn't go anywhere very fast, said spokeswoman Jackie Barron. "I don't think people realize how slowly water moves through the Floridan aquifer: It moves about 1,000 feet a month."

This isn't the first time the company's toxic waste has escaped confinement. In 1994, a cavernous sinkhole, 106 feet wide by 185 feet deep, opened in the center of an IMC-Agrico (now Mosaic) waste stack, releasing 20.8 million pounds of liquid phosphoric acid into the ground below, according to The News-Press archive. The company was able to clean up the spill before it harmed the drinking water supply, regulators said, though Phil Coram of the state's Department of Environmental Protection called the incident "our worst nightmare come true — the toxic water breaching to the aquifer.''

Starting in 2001, all new gypsum stacks were required to have a lining at the bottom to designed prevent toxic waste from seeping into the groundwater. Yet the lining failed when this latest sinkhole opened.

Dee Ann Miller, spokeswoman for the state's Department of Environmental Protection, said the company is updating state and federal agencies on the situation.

"Along with reviewing daily reports, DEP is performing frequent site visits to make sure timely and appropriate response continues in order to safeguard public health and the environment," Miller wrote in an email to The Associated Press. "While monitoring to date indicates that the process water is being successfully contained, groundwater monitoring will continue to ensure there are no offsite or long-term effects."

The Polk County plant is still running, producing "a needed product to grow food for 7.4 billion people on this planet," notes Rick Joyce, former director of Lee County's environmental sciences division and now president and partner of Forestry Resources Ecological, Inc. "The reality is that Florida supplies 90 percent of the U.S. phosphate ore to make fertilizer, and 30 percent for the world."

Gypsum is a slightly radioactive byproduct of the process, with more than 1 billion tons of it "stacked" at 20 locations in Florida, which Joyce says is a problem, though a solvable one. "Stacking phosphogypsum in huge piles in not the answer. For many years, there has been lots of talking about phosphogypsum stacks, but no good solutions. Politics aside, it is imperative we find long-term solutions to these piles to reduce this significant contamination risk to ground and surface water... We, as both government and private entities, must immediately fund and find an economically viable process for making phosphogypsum safe and usable."

Critics say new water rules violate public interests

The incident comes less than a year after Mosaic settled a massive federal environmental lawsuit with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in which the company agreed to nearly $2 billion in fixes, improvements and cleanups at its plants.

Since the 1960s, toxic solid waste from fertilizer production in Florida has been growing — some stored in 500-foot-tall piles that sometimes span more than 600 acres. Mosaic makes a common phosphorus-based fertilizer, the production of which creates polluted water and solid waste.

In 2004, during Hurricane Frances, 65 million gallons of polluted waste from a fertilizer plant was sent into waters near Tampa Bay, resulting in thousands of dead fish and other marine life.

EPA found that Mosaic improperly handled its facilities, which posed a threat to the environment and human health. These violations led to last year's legal settlement and the company's public commitment to become more environmentally friendly.

Environmental groups said the damage from the sinkhole could be severe, and adds to decades of pollution from the phosphorous fertilizer industry. "I wish we could say that watching an environmental tragedy unfolding at a Florida phosphate mining site was a new occurrence, but sadly, it's happened repeatedly," said Tania Galloni, an attorney with the Florida office of Earthjustice, an environmental advocacy nonprofit . "These phosphate companies are playing roulette with our public waters."

For Anita Cereceda, Fort Myers Beach town council member and its former mayor, this incident has reminded her how connected residents are to the environment, and "how monumentally important it is to every element of our lives and livelihood. As a native Southwest Floridian I can say I always just thought it would always be there for me, and the older I get the more I realize it won't be unless we do everything in our power to protect it now."

— The Associated Press contributed to this report

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