TAMPA - With Hurricane Ivan swirling near Florida, Cargill Crop Nutrition is scrambling to drain an industrial recycling system that includes a faulty gypsum stack holding a billion gallons of heavily polluted water above Hillsborough Bay.
A break in the stack Sunday caused by waves whipped up by Frances forced the Riverview fertilizer manufacturer to dump nearly 70-million gallons of treated but toxic water into a creek that leads to Hillsborough Bay.
The company repaired the break and plans to line the weakened area with plastic to avoid a repeat performance if Ivan hits, said Sam Elrabi, a spokesman for the Hillsborough Environmental Protection Commission, which monitors the water management practices at Cargill.
Now the focus has shifted to a nearby 238-acre holding pond, made of an 18-foot earthen wall, that is "full to the rim" and vulnerable to a similar break, Elrabi said.
"We need to move water out of that," he said. "We're all working around the clock to provide the best possible protection to the public and to the environment."
Nearly 90-million gallons of polluted water needs to be relocated from the pond, Elrabi said.
Plant operations stopped Thursday afternoon to hasten the water shuffling, said David Jellerson, Cargill's environmental manager.
Cargill plans to pump a third of the excess water to the top of an old gypsum pile that hasn't been used since 1990. Some also is being trucked to a facility in Polk County that has extra storage space.
Another 30-million gallons will go into a stormwater ditch that surrounds Cargill's active gypsum stack, Elrabi said. There, it will be treated with a neutralizing agent to lower its acidity and, if Ivan hits, discharged into Archie Creek, which flows into Hillsborough Bay.
If the weather holds up, Cargill and the regulatory agencies will consider other options for the water. One possibility is using advanced treatment to improve the water to a quality suitable for release into the environment.
For now, though, officials are preparing for the worst.
"Under normal conditions we would be breathing a little bit easier. But we are not dealing with normal conditions," Elrabi said. "We're not going to sit, relax and enjoy the movie. We're assuming this thing is coming overhead."
If that happens, Cargill will need to get rid of the water as quickly as possible.
Environmental agencies say that the wastewater already released by Cargill due to Frances may have set back their goals for restoring sea grass and reviving the bay's ecology by years. Cargill's decision to dump the water added large amounts of nitrogen to the bay, which inhibits sea grass growth. Environmental and Cargill officials discussed the spill Thursday during a meeting of the Hillsborough County Environmental Protection Commission.
Also Thursday, protesters gathered near the Riverview plant and circulated a petition asking for stricter regulation of the phosphate industry.
The water release began Sunday after a break in a dike at the top of a 180-foot phosphogypsum pile holding polluted water used to make fertilizer from phosphate. The water streamed down the pile into a stormwater ditch that surrounds the base of the stack. To keep the ditch from overflowing, the company treated and discharged the contaminated water into Archie Creek.
Environmental regulators have been keeping a close eye all week on the impact of the acidic water on fish. They have reported seeing dozens of dead stingrays, crabs, snook and mullet.
Also of concern is the large amount of nitrogen in the water and its negative effect on sea grass beds, an important food source and breeding ground for wildlife.
To promote sea grass growth, a group of local governments, environmental agencies and industry representatives approved a plan in 1998 to reduce nitrogen dumped into Hillsborough Bay by 6 tons a year. But the release in just two days from Cargill added 93 tons of nitrogen to the bay, said Dick Eckenrod, executive director of the Tampa Bay Estuary Program.
"We pretty clearly have blown that goal out of the water," he told the EPC.
Tampa Bay lost more than 50 percent of its sea grass from 1950 to 1982 as the coastline developed. About one quarter of that lost sea grass has been recovered over the past 20 years, largely by controlling nitrogen levels through improved stormwater treatment, expanding reclaimed water programs and reducing air pollution at a Tampa Electric Co. plant, Eckenrod said.
The situation faced by Cargill with Ivan approaching is similar to one last year at another fertilizer factory, Piney Point, just south of the Hillsborough-Manatee county line. For six months in 2003, state officials dumped millions of gallons of treated wastewater from the saturated plant into the Gulf of Mexico to avoid a disaster during hurricane season.
State officials have been working to remove contaminated water from the abandoned Piney Point plant since taking it over in 2001 after its owners went bankrupt. Wastewater is currently being disposed of in Bishop's Harbor, an aquatic preserve on Tampa Bay.
In an Aug. 11 report, state officials said Piney Point has enough water storage space to accommodate major rains.
Times staff writer Craig Pittman contributed to this report. Janet Zink can be reached at 813 226-3401 or jzink@sptimes.com
