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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region Forums'No community should suffer this': Florida's toxic breach was decades in the making
A leak at an abandoned fertilizer plant is just the latest development at a site that has polluted the area since it was built
Its been a week since a significant leak at a long-abandoned fertilizer plant in the Tampa Bay area threatened the surrounding groundwater, soil, and local water supplies.
Last weekend, officials ordered more than 300 families living near the 676-acre Piney Point plant site in Manatee county to evacuate. The sheriff even emptied out his jails first floor of inmates in case a 20-foot wall of water came rolling their way.
By Monday, local officials said they thought the crisis had been averted; they lifted evacuation orders on Tuesday afternoon. But what they meant was that imminent catastrophe had been postponed. The long-term, slow-moving crisis of toxicity, decades in the making, remains and is echoed at dozens of radioactive ponds across the state.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/11/florida-piney-point-fertilizer-plant-toxic-leak
dalton99a
(81,084 posts)edhopper
(33,212 posts)since Jeb Bush in 1998. Is there any question of why this happened?
exboyfil
(17,857 posts)At first I thought that was this leak. What the EPA isn't around to be blamed (the breach when they tried to stabilize an abandoned gold mine)?
keithbvadu2
(36,370 posts)Something like this has never happened before (that we want to acknowledge).
There's no way it could be foreseen.
gratuitous
(82,849 posts)And it's not leaking right now, so why should we "waste" money on a problem that isn't happening yet? Puts me in mind of the old song The Arkansas Traveler, who sees an old fella sitting on his porch playing a fiddle. It starts raining, and the roof is leaking something terrible. The traveler asks the man why he doesn't fix his roof? Who's gonna work on the roof with all this rain? Well, why don't you fix it when it isn't raining? Roof don't leak then, young fella.