MANATEE, Fla. — A deeper sigh of relief comes with every passing minute at Piney Point, where a giant leaking pond has threatened catastrophe over the past week.
After deploying dive teams along with a submersible remote vehicle on Wednesday, engineers have identified the source of the leak that could have led to a full breach gushing out a wall of water 20 feet high.
But that threat is behind us, they say.
Now, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is working to identify the best method to plug the leak — either by patching the hole or blocking it with fill.
“My understanding is that they found the leak where they thought it was in the southeast corner,” Acting County Administrator Scott Hopes said Thursday. “The divers will be going down, and they’re thinking of the possibility of dropping a big steel plate to seal it off.”
The 676-acre site contains three ponds that hold leftover process water, which was used to run the heavy machinery that prepares phosphate. After being used in that process, the water absorbs nutrients and holds high levels of nitrogen and phosphorous.
Because process water is nutrient-rich, it must be treated before it’s released back into local waterways. At Piney Point, the amount of water continued to increase due to rainfall. The ponds are so large that every new inch of rainfall adds another 1.36 million gallons of water.
It got to be too much on March 25 — just months after site manager Jeff Barath warned county officials that the ponds were reaching max capacity — when a leak was detected in the site’s largest pond.
At the time, the 77-acre New Gypsum Stack South pond held about 480 million gallons of water. That pond sits on top of a lined gypsum stack. Gypsum is a radioactive byproduct of phosphate mining that cannot be used for anything else.
Piney Point’s gypsum stacks form gigantic mounds that sit at the highest elevation in Manatee County, but the leak in the pond could have sent the side of the stack’s walls tumbling, creating a tidal wave.
The Florida Department of Environmental Protection stepped in to prevent that scenario. They approved an emergency order that allowed the process water to be pumped out near Port Manatee.
For better or worse, the draining of that water into Tampa Bay helped to avoid a disaster on land, but just as alarming is the environmental mess that could be brewing out on the water.
The coming weeks, scientists say, will be key to determining what impacts the pollution will have on local water quality.
Algae organisms thrive off of some of the main nutrients in that process water, and with more than 200 million gallons of it in the bay, many fear it could lead to a harmful algae bloom.
Tampa Bay, along with the entire southwest coast of Florida, was severely affected by a long-lasting bloom of red tide, caused by the karenia brevis algae, in 2018.
FDEP is already monitoring local water quality to determine how the contaminated water is affecting the bay. On Wednesday, the agency announced that it had begun to detect elevated levels of phosphorous.
Despite those excess nutrients in the water, algae would need ideal conditions to transform into a full bloom, which could take as much as three weeks. In that time, certain natural conditions like water temperature, wind speed and the amount of sunlight in the area will be critical.
After a recent visit to the Piney Point site, FDEP Secretary Noah Valenstein vowed to keep staff there until a full cleanup could be completed. Those efforts are already underway.
“As an agency, I’m committed to having our team stay here — the team we’ve surged in — to have that same level of presence until this site is closed down,” Valenstein said.
“The goal is obviously to not let there be another reinvention of the site but to make sure that the only story is that it is closing permanently,” he added.
On Wednesday afternoon, FDEP announced that it contracted two “innovative technology companies to initiate nutrient reduction and removal treatments from water on-site prior to discharging to Port Manatee.”
One of those companies is Nclear, which previously courted the Manatee Board of County Commissioners in a Feb. 2 presentation. At the time, Mike Mies, the company’s CEO, touted that his technology could both remove and recycle the nutrients in the water.
Through electrochemical technology, Mies predicted that Nclear could recycle 1.5 million pounds of phosphorous and 1.4 million pounds of ammonia. The ammonia would then be converted into nitrogen gas, which is harmless in the atmosphere, Mies said.
“The ‘N’ in Nclear stands for nutrients,” Mies explained. “Our whole focus and the reason we started the company is to address the problems of nutrient pollution of both nitrogen and phosphorous, which of course are the two primary contaminants at Piney Point.”
That’s not the first time Nclear has tried to sell the county on resolving Piney Point with its technology. Mies made a similar presentation before the board in 2017.
In a Wednesday email update to FDEP, managers from site owner HRK said they expected Nclear to begin cleaning water by Thursday evening. Phosphorous Free Water Solutions is another company on-site to conduct water cleaning efforts, the email said.
Representatives from Nclear and Phosphorous Free Water Solutions did not respond to requests for comment Thursday.
Earlier in the week, commissioners approved an emergency resolution allowing a hydrogeological firm to craft plans to build a deep well to dispose of Piney Point’s polluted water.
A deep well, also known as an underground injection control well, would send the water about 3,500 feet below ground, below the aquifer. The water would receive treatment first and the county would own the well, allowing local officials to fully control what goes in it.
