By Jesse Newman
Fertilizer giant Mosaic Co. is paying tens of millions of
dollars to patch a central Florida sinkhole and monitor for
hazardous runoff, an incident that has heightened environmental
concerns involving an industry critical to the U.S. food
supply.
"This is a very unfortunate event and one we certainly wouldn't
have wanted to happen to us," Mosaic Chief Executive Joc O'Rourke
said in an interview this month.
The 240-foot-deep hole opened beneath a pile of mining waste at
Mosaic's plant in Mulberry, Fla., about 30 miles east of Tampa, in
late August and drained contaminated water into an aquifer that
provides drinking water for communities as far north as southern
Georgia.
The company in early November said it would spend some $60
million to seal hole with concrete and pump the contaminated water
out of the aquifer. Mosaic has also guaranteed Florida $40 million
if it fails to take actions like plugging the hole and monitoring
nearby drinking-water wells through 2018.
"We take our obligation to our community extremely seriously,"
Mr. O'Rourke said. "I have great faith that we will right the issue
and ultimately our contribution to society will be much greater
than the impacts."
The phosphate fertilizer that helped nourish the record U.S.
corn and soybean harvests this year is made from mining millions of
tons of mineral-rich earth. Environmentalists say the wastewater
and towering mountains of refuse left behind by the
fertilizer-manufacturing process take too big a toll.
At Mosaic's plant in Mulberry, millions of gallons of acidic
water created during fertilizer production spilled into the
aquifer, along with unknown quantities of phosphogypsum, a mildly
radioactive fertilizer byproduct.
"Phosphate production does enormous damage even when everything
goes right," said Bradley Marshall, an attorney at Earthjustice, a
nonprofit environmental-law group. He said the porous limestone
surrounding the local water table car easily allow pollutants to
spread.
"The Florida aquifer is like Swiss cheese," he said.
Mosaic said water in the aquifer moves slowly, allowing the
company to retrieve the contaminated water before it flows off its
property.
Mosaic has had trouble with mining waste before. Last year, the
company struck a deal worth more than $800 million with regulators
to clean up hazardous waste from its operations in Louisiana and
Florida.
In September, residents near Mosaic's Mulberry sinkhole sued to
hold the company responsible for potential drinking-well
contamination. Days later, Governor Rick Scott ordered Florida's
environmental protection department to issue an emergency rule
requiring businesses and local governments to inform the public and
the department within 24 hours of a pollution incident.
Samples from more than 900 private wells nearby show no effects
from the spill, the state environment department said.
The Mosaic facility processes phosphate rock from a swath of
central Florida known as Bone Valley for its fossil beds that
harbor the mineral. Florida supplies roughly 70% of the phosphate
rock for U.S. fertilizers. Manufacturing fertilizer leaves behind
mounds of refuse called phosphogypsum stacks--or gyp stacks--which
pockmark the landscape. Collectively, they cover thousands of acres
and each can reach 500 feet high.
"Each is a disaster waiting to happen," said Beverly Griffiths,
chairwoman of Sierra Club Florida's phosphate committee. The Sierra
Club implored the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to freeze new mining
permits until the industry's effects are better understood.
A sinkhole opened in 1994 under the same gyp stack in Mulberry,
then owned by IMC Global Inc. Mosaic said the sinkhole was repaired
at the time and that no other work was needed once they took over
the facility. Mosaic said contamination didn't escape the property
then, either.
Another Florida fertilizer maker, Mulberry Corp., filed for
bankruptcy and abandoned a plant in 2001, leaving officials to pump
wastewater onto a barge and dump it in the Gulf of Mexico. In 2009,
another sinkhole emptied more than 90 million gallons of hazardous
wastewater into the Florida aquifer, the Environmental Protection
Agency said.
Environmentalists said the latest breach validates their
warnings about phosphate mining's dangers. Some want more
regulation. Some want to stop fertilizer production completely.
Brian Birky, executive director at the Florida Industrial and
Phosphate Research Institute, said the U.S. can't do without the
fertilizer mined there. Over the past half-century, the U.S. has
seen an increase in the use of phosphate-based fertilizer as well
as high-tech seeds and equipment, pushing crop yields ever
higher.
Mosaic's Mr. O'Rourke said consumers benefit from the low food
prices those yields make possible. He said U.S.-made fertilizer
will be necessary to produce the calories to feed a booming global
population.
"If you want to feed eight to nine billion people, you have to
do it using mined and manufactured fertilizers," he said. He
expects phosphate mining in Florida to continue for at least 40
more years.
"The idea of 40 more years of mining in central Florida is
revolting," said Jacki Lopez, staff attorney and director of the
Center for Biological Diversity in Florida.
"It's radioactive waste," Ms. Lopez said. "Where does all that
go?"
Write to Jesse Newman at jesse.newman@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
November 13, 2016 07:14 ET (12:14 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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