Neighbors anxious after Florida sinkhole contaminates water

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Associated Press

Neighbors anxious after Florida sinkhole contaminates water

Tamara Lush and Jason Dearen, Associated Press

Updated 3:19 am, Thursday, September 29, 2016


water and fertilizer plant waste into Florida's main drinking-water aquifer are fearful and fuming that it took 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 well water.

Meanwhile, the Mosaic Co. — one of the world's largest producers of phosphate and potash for fertilizer — acknowledged Wednesday that the contamination is spreading in the groundwater.

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 in the state.

Read more: http://www.chron.com/news/us/article/Neighbors-anxious-after-Florida-sinkhole-9421142.php

[Atman]

1. Mosaic is kindly testing the water for the residents.

How nice of them. They've offered to do the testing themselves, at their expense. I'm sure there is no conflict here. Of course they'll be totally truthfull and the test results will be accurate. Sure.

[cynzke]

2. ANXIOUS NOW???

Wait till you see the bill for clean up and guess who will be paying for it?

[kimbutgar]

3. But hey keeping voting republican Floridians they sooooo work for your best interests.

[csziggy]

4. For close to one hundred years phosphate mines have dominated that part of Florida

My grandfather worked for Swift & Company as a mine manager starting in 1925. Then the companies owned the towns where the workers lived - my grandfather lived in Agricola until Swift needed to mine under where the town stood. The houses were sold - my grandparents bought one and moved it to Eagle Lake as a retirement home; my parents bought another and moved it into Bartow and I grew up in that house. Same for the little town, Brewster, that my parents lived in when I was born. Brewster was owned by American Cyanamide and was mined in the late 1950s.

There is nothing left of Agricola but an intersection with a road named for the town. All that is left of Brewster is the smoke stack from the power station and a few walls. And photos in the state archives - many of which were taken by my grandfather.

There used to be a bank in Bartow named Citrus & Chemical Bank - citrus for the agriculture and chemical for the phosphate and associated industries. In the 1960s when I lived there few citrus trees were left and the truck farms were gone. No cattle ranches were left in the area, either.

I've told the story of how in the late 1960s my Dad was paid with a piece of land between Bartow and Mulberry. He originally planned to plant it with orange trees - his father had done that with land outside the immediate area in the 1930s and our family still owns a grove from that time. He took some potted orange trees out, left them at the property and went back a few days later to plant them. They were all dead with no leaves.

Dad took samples to the agriculture lab and had them testing - they were loaded with fluoride. Not too surprising since there was a fluoride plant across the road but Dad had thought they were controlling the emissions from the plant. He was told the levels were too high to put livestock or to build homes there, either - he'd planned to develop the land for homes eventually.

It turned out that the high emissions were why the truck farm and cattle industries had left the area.

Fluoride
Phosphate rocks contain high levels of fluoride. Consequently, the widespread use of phosphate fertilizers has increased soil fluoride concentrations.[50] It has been found that food contamination from fertilizer is of little concern as plants accumulate little fluoride from the soil; of greater concern is the possibility of fluoride toxicity to livestock that ingest contaminated soils.[54][55] Also of possible concern are the effects of fluoride on soil microorganisms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertilizer#Fluoride

Those pollution levels led to the first clean air act in the country:

The Florida Legislature enacted the Florida Air and Water Pollution Control Act (FAWPCA) in 1967, in recognition that pollution of Florida's air and water is a menace to public health and welfare; is harmful to wildlife; and impairs domestic, agricultural, industrial, and other uses of air and water. Since 1967, FAWPCA has been modified to reflect changing federal and state policies and rules, as well as changing environmental protection needs in Florida.
http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/fe607

Since the 1980s the various companies that used to mine phosphate have been bought up. Now Mosaic owns most of them. And since the Republicans have been in charge of the state government, enforcement has been lax even though the laws about pollution have gotten tougher.

[dembotoz]

5. thank you that was interesting

between raising oceans, sink holes and zika mosquitoes i have less and less desire to move to florida.
used to work for a company with main offices in tampa.
sort of my dream job would be to be transferred down there.
obviously never happened.
perhaps my marginal competence was a good thing after all

[csziggy]

6. Florida in some areas is not bad at all

I HATE the tourist traps -having grown up here I know how artificial they are. Tampa has gotten more blue than it used to be, as has much of the I-4 corridor - though Central Florida is still pretty red.

I moved away from Central Florida in 1972, came up here to Tallahassee and fell in love with our little hills and all the tress. Tallahassee and Leon County are VERY blue. Our worst problems come from the idiots the rest of the state send up here to run the government. That and the fact that much of our small county is owned by federal, state,county and city governments so even for our small size the property tax base is tiny.

An advantage of Tallahassee is that even with global warming and rising sea levels, we'll stay above water. The ancient shoreline was south of Tallahassee - the Cody Scarp still shows where the sea level was during the Pleistocene (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cody_Scarp). The red areas of Wakulla County might drown, but those of us in the Red Hills of Florida will be fine!

If the water goes up 150 feet I will have an offshore island since my home is on a 200 foot about sea level ridge.

Sinkholes are not a huge worry for me either, though they showed up a lot around Bartow in the 60s and we have old ones here in North Florida (Leon Sinks ). They really don't show up that often and seldom take homes. Most buildings damaged by sinks are built on marginal land.

When I was in college the sinks were where you stopped to cool off and rinse the salt off on the way back from the beaches on the cost. Now they are all on private land or in the National Forest where they will not let anyone swim.

At 64 I'm not going to worry about Zika - for most people it's like a mild flu. The main danger is for pregnant women and I no longer have the parts for that and permanently prevented the possibility in 1977.