Neighbors of a Plant City phosphate plant think it is ruining their health. So far, the scientific evidence suggests the fears are overstated. Still, they are strong.
By RON MATUS
Published August 31, 2003
[Times photo: Jennifer Sens]
This is the Coronet Industries plant in Plant City.
The Rev. Johnnie Cooper works at home to get answers to whether ditches in his Plant City neighborhood carry dangerous pollutants from the Coronet Industries plant.
Albert Franco bathes his son, Nicholas, 2. The Francos, who live near the Coronet plant, fear pollution may have caused their son's developmental disorder.
PLANT CITY - People aren't brewing up much tea on the south side of the city these days. Not much lemonade or Kool-Aid either. A pot of coffee can be an ordeal. A shower, cause for anxiety.
It's the water.
People think it's killing them.
In June, state health officials released a nine-page report that repeated - but did not attempt to validate - what some residents had whispered for years about cancer and bad water and acidic dust. A federal agency saw enough to order a yearlong investigation. Residents saw enough to confirm their worst nightmares.
In their eyes, the backyard well that once brought up water so sweet Perrier would be jealous has become a pipeline for industrial poison. Now, the water that floods streets after every thunderstorm isn't just a nuisance, it's dangerous. Suddenly, every family's painful brush with cancer or birth defects fits a sinister pattern.
The smoking gun? There isn't one.
Instead, there are smoking stacks and red flags: A handful of tainted wells. A couple of old landfills. A company repeatedly chided by regulators.
To residents, it adds up. Especially because Coronet Industries is involved. They watch white smoke billow from Coronet's aging plant, where for decades phosphate has been chemically cooked into an additive for chicken feed, and they see corporate outlaws, spineless bureaucrats - and answers.
"There has been something going on for years and years and years," said Ann Keel, 67, who lives with her husband, Charles, a mile south of the plant.
Keel lost a 3-year-old son to a rare cancer, and a brother and two sisters to colon cancer. The plant, she says in her living room, surrounded by portraits of grandchildren, "is the only thing I can tie together with the whole family."
It doesn't help that Coronet is linked to an industry with an unshakeable reputation as an environmental menace. People around Plant City know the downside of phosphate mining and processing as well as anyone: The massive spills of acidic water. The mountains of radioactive waste.
Regulators have shown "a pattern of failure to address phosphate compliance," wrote the Rev. Johnnie Cooper, a Plant City resident, in a letter to federal officials in July.
But so far, there is no proof people here are being sickened by pollution:
- Cancer rates in zip codes closest to the plant are on par with the state average.
- Pollution monitors show Plant City has better air than Tampa.
- Authorities are finding unexpected amounts of pollution in drinking-water wells, but not at levels likely to make people sick.
Tests on 43 wells near the plant this month found one with elevated levels of arsenic, a cancer-causing metal found in phosphate and pesticides. The levels were high enough to prompt handouts of bottled water, but were they high enough to cause harm?
Health officials explain it this way.
The incoming federal standard for arsenic is 10 parts per billion. That means somebody drinking 2 liters of water with that level of arsenic every day for 70 years would face a 1 in 1-million chance of getting cancer, said Doug Holt, director of the Hillsborough County Health Department. Somebody drinking water with 20 parts per billion over the same time period would face a 2 in 1-million risk, he said.
The level in the well: 13 parts per billion.
The risk: "Very low," Holt said.
Still, residents are terrified. The talk of cancer never stops. And the truth is, the jury is still out.
No one knows what they'll find in the next well.
In coming months, investigators will continue testing wells, taking urine samples and carefully choosing their words. They don't want to fuel hysteria. Or appear cold to very real fears.
When residents talk, "I see it in their faces," said Holt, who is part of the multiagency probe. "I must answer the question: Is there something making them sick?"
Many residents believe they already know the answer.
Drawn together
Johnnie Cooper and Elaine Edenfield lived 2 miles apart for decades, yet never met until April. Suspicion brought them together.
Edenfield, 57, raised her family in Springhead, just outside Plant City. The community rambles east and south of hundreds of acres where Coronet once gouged the earth for phosphate and now turns the material into animal food. Wood-frame homes cozy up to remnant orange groves. Trailers with U.S. flags sidle up to strawberry patches.
When Edenfield heard last year that a developer wanted to build 2,600 homes on former Coronet land, she remembered one of two old municipal landfills nearby. Then she remembered a story about Coronet dumping arsenic-laden wastewater.
"Something clicked," said Edenfield, a night-shift nurse who collects angel figurines.
Edenfield started writing down names. So did her friends. Within a week, they had a long and morbid list: 97 people within a 3-mile radius. All friends or family. All victims of cancer.
Among them, Edenfield's son, a survivor of testicular cancer.
According to the National Cancer Institute, about two in every five people will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetimes. About one in five will die from it. It is a disease that touches nearly every family.
Yet, as Edenfield watched the list grow, "it just seemed unreal," she said.
Meanwhile, from his nearby neighborhood of Lincoln Park, Johnnie Cooper was writing to Washington, D.C.
Lincoln Park is a black, working-class neighborhood west of Coronet stacked with cinder-block homes and prone to frequent floods.
Cooper, 64, says the water that spills into his neighborhood runs downhill from land once mined by Coronet. It picks up pollution from old landfills and mining pits, then gets piped into Lincoln Park through ditches, he says. After floods, the pollution lingers in yards and gets tracked into homes.
Coper says he was first warned about the water 30 years ago, from what he considers a credible source on death: local morticians.
"They said "Coop, we've got something in the ground here,"' said Cooper, a blue-collar minister who heads the Plant City chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Council, a civil rights group.
Cooper says he tried back then to persuade local officials to investigate, even making a trip to Atlanta to prod federal authorities. Nothing happened.
But Cooper never forgot what the morticians told him. In the fall, after another week filled with too many funerals, he petitioned the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.
Finally, the right button. The agency asked state officials to take a look.
In April, when the Florida Department of Health dispatched an official from Tallahassee to Plant City, Cooper's concerns were her priority. But when the official met with her Hillsborough counterparts, they had a surprise for her: Elaine Edenfield's cancer list.
A few hours later, the nurse and the minister were exchanging hellos and detailing cancer cases, house by house.
"Hard to miss'
The Coronet plant won't win any beauty contests.
Tucked away just south of Plant City, it's a sprawling collection of silos, catwalks and corrugated metal, dingy and stained, surrounded by uncut grass and protected by barbed wire. Every minute of every day, smoke pours from gritty stacks like giant cigarettes that never go out.
Company officials say visibility makes the plant a convenient scapegoat.
"We're hard to miss," said David Weinstein, a Tampa attorney who represents the company.
Weinstein calls the charges against Coronet "unfair and premature."
Even if investigators find health or environmental problems off site and then track them to the plant, it would be wrong to slam the company that has operated it only since 1993, he said. Since 1908, a handful of companies have owned the plant.
"For most of that time," Weinstein said, "environmental laws were either nonexistent or significantly different than they are today."
Residents don't buy the company's line. If Coronet were on trial, its environmental record would be Exhibit A:
- In 1997 and 1998, Coronet illegally discharged tens of millions of gallons of polluted wastewater into English Creek, which flows through Springhead and pours into the Alafia River.
The company's permit allows it to occasionally release wastewater from its treatment ponds, but only if it meets state standards. In this case, the water contained too much arsenic.
The state Department of Environmental Protection fined the company $29,000.
On Friday, Coronet began discharging more wastewater - with the DEP's okay.
Prodded by more recent problems, the DEP ordered Coronet to do a comprehensive study, now under way, of pollution across its 900-acre campus.
High levels of arsenic, cadmium, chromium and other toxins have been found in soil and groundwater there. But according to DEP officials, only one of 11 monitoring wells has showed pollutants in levels beyond drinking-water standards.
Coronet's permit allows it to exceed standards on site as long as pollutants don't travel beyond the property line.
Last year, the Hillsborough County Environmental Protection Commission threatened to revoke Coronet's air permit after yet another routine inspection found equipment amiss. The individual issues were minor but together pointed to "an institutional problem," said Jerry Campbell, director of the county's air management division.
By Hillsborough standards, Coronet is not a big polluter. Its stacks emit about 60 tons of dust each year, and 4 tons of hydrogen fluoride, a toxic gas that in high concentrations can cause respiratory problems.
By comparison, TECO's power plant near the Port of Tampa belches 1,900 tons of dust a year and 110 tons of hydrogen fluoride.
The difference: At Coronet, residents live virtually next door.
Under county pressure, the company agreed to a major overhaul by spring 2005.
Despite the compliance problems, regulators say the plant's air emissions do not appear to be a public health threat. Since 1998, they have investigated 14 complaints about dust or fumes, but none turned out to be major, Campbell said.
Just in case, the commission installed three new pollution monitors near the plant Thursday. Soil tests also are planned to determine whether air pollution has built up over time.
"We are not close-minded to their concerns," Campbell said about residents. "We come to work every day and have to deal with it. They have to go home to it."
Suspicions heightened
When word spread in June about a health investigation, the community shuddered.
In the wake of the state report, city commissioners postponed final approval for the biggest subdivision in city history, and a criminal investigation was launched into charges of illegally buried waste.
Lawyers - including the California law firm associated with Erin Brockovich, the Hollywood-inspiring crusader - began sniffing around, too.
Intense media coverage amplified every new development.
On Aug. 19, 700 scared and angry people met with health officials at a middle school. Plant City, known far and wide for its strawberry festival, was becoming synonymous with cancer clusters instead of shortcake.
For jittery residents, attention verified fears.
"You got tons of people who are going to suffer from this," said Tracy Powell, 22, who lives a few hundred yards south of Coronet.
People have lived in the shadow of the plant since it was built.
The community is more diverse now, but some still remember when it was a company town. The factory "put meals on the table for a lot of families," said John Wright, 64.
But to hear some residents tell it, the meals must have come with dark mutterings.
Milky water churns through creeks, leaving rank odors and dead fish, they say. Plant dust is so corrosive it eats through car paint and rots shingles, they say. Crops have shriveled. Cows have died.
"I've had a lot of deformity" with strawberries," said grower Larry Ennis, who farms 10 acres across the street from the plant.
Nobody knows what to believe anymore.
In a July e-mail to state health officials, Roger St. Pierre complained that his well water had become foul-smelling and "terrible to drink." He and his wife were suffering bouts of diarrhea. So were their dogs.
"We don't know if this has to do with the Coronet Mines problem," St. Pierre wrote. But the dogs weren't sick before.
Mary Wetherington, 31, said she hasn't drunk her well water since January, when she made a pot of coffee and "it turned fluorescent green."
She has no doubt the plant is responsible.
Emerging evidence
Almost weekly, new evidence is trickling in. But trying to make sense of it can make brains fry and hearts skip.
Besides the arsenic, the well tests earlier this month found nine wells with relatively high levels of boron, a substance that in high doses can cause stomach ailments.
Both arsenic and boron are Coronet byproducts, but investigators say it's too early to say whether the plant is responsible. As Coronet's attorney is quick to point out, boron is also found in fertilizer for strawberries.
Holt said federal health authorities don't require testing for boron in public water supplies because it is not considered a major threat. He said it is not likely to hurt people unless it reaches levels of 100,000 parts per billion.
The wells near Coronet ranged from about 800 to 10,000 parts per billion.
A problem?
To some extent, people must "interpret that level of risk for themselves," Holt said.
And they have.
When authorities found boron in her well, Ethel Robbins, 63, found clues.
Years of upset stomachs began to make sense. So did her son's fatigue, her daughter's seizures, her mom's kidney problems.
"Something's causing this," said Robbins, a school bus driver whose living room window faces Coronet's ever-smoking stacks. "It's not like you've been this way your whole life."
