Guest Op/Ed: Ammonia Explosions

On April 19, 2013, the Tampa Bay Times reacted to the news of a massive ammonia explosion in a small Texas town. Fifteen people died and over 160 were injured in that blast. The paper revealed that "hundreds of thousands of tons" of explosive ammonia are stockpiled or flowing through the Port of Tampa on any given day.

Then, we recently learned of another blast, of city-killing scale, that devastated Beirut, Lebanon, again from large stockpiles of ammonia. It is not known whether this explosion was triggered by terrorists, or by the fireworks factory that went up in a smaller explosion, before the ammonia. Or both. The bodies are still being counted, and rescue operations ongoing. Some 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate was responsible for today’s blast.

There is a lengthy list of explosions from ammonia, and the fertilizer created when it is combined with phosphoric acid. Timothy McVeigh’s truck bomb was packed with fertilizer and diesel fuel, and it blew the face off the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people and wounding 680.

Hundreds of thousands of tons of anhydrous ammonia, used primarily in fertilizer operations by the Mosaic Co., are stored in the Port of Tampa, and flow in and out of the city by ship, rail and truck. Estimates of damage conducted as part of a preparedness study by the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office decades ago showed a blast radius of Hiroshima size, with Ybor City leveled, and thousands of casualties if port stockpiles were to be ignited.

One is tempted to think, Wow, it’s a terrorist’s dream come true! Blow up an American city and Centcom too, all with one match. But we don’t need to conjure up the Taliban or Al Qaeda to feel real fear. We just need to confront the safety record of the company responsible for the ammonia stockpiles and flows: Mosaic.

In the past year alone, there were five alerts from Mosaic at the Peace River Manasota Regional Water Supply Authority causing the water intakes in the Peace River to be closed.

There is an ongoing collapse of a phosphogypsum stack in Bartow, and one in Louisiana, both Mosaic facilities.

There was a sinkhole in the south "stack" at New Wales in 2016, that allowed 250 million gallons of contaminated, radioactive and highly acidic process fluids to escape into the Floridan Aquifer, which much of the state uses for drinking water.

There was another, much larger sinkhole at a different New Wales stack in 1994, and in the same year, a nearby stack breached in a rainstorm, releasing millions of gallons of stack-top process fluids into nearby communities and killing all life in the Alafia River–a drinking water source for Tampa.

The event that still troubles people in Charlotte Harbor and the Peace River basin was caused by the total collapse of a "slime pond," a billion-gallon containment facility for an intermediate stage in the phosphate process. Over 100 miles of the Peace River, and much of the Peace River estuary, became a thick milky white color, and millions of fish died. People say the harbor hasn’t been the same since.

Mosaic tells the county commissions and the press, in its quest for more mining permits, that these, and many, many more, were "anomalies.“ But at what point does a series of "anomalies“ become a pattern? Business as usual. The new normal.

Mosaic will assure the people of Tampa that they have nothing to worry about. But it will be scant comfort to the survivors, after the massive explosion that could realistically be unleashed by the ammonia in the Port, that their loved ones died and their property was destroyed by an anomaly.