Phosphate Mining's Latest Disaster Should Awaken Floridians

A 45-foot-wide, 300 foot deep sinkhole that opened underneath one of Mosaic's phosphogypsum stacks at the company's phosphate fertilizer plant in Mulberry last month has put hundreds of millions of gallons of contaminated water into the Floridan Aquifer. The leak isn't likely to be repaired for months. Still, the company and DEP waited weeks before acknowledging the catastrophe, failing to even notify neighbors who share the water source.

The pond, which was used to hold acidic water, has been drained. However, polluted water is still leaking from the gypsum stack and flowing into the sinkhole. Contaminated water will continue to leak with every new rainfall until the sinkhole is filled, and the stack cannot be relocated. Mosaic became aware of the leak as early as August 27 and began diverting water from the 250 million gallons-capacity pond. The next day, Mosaic notified the Florida Department of Environmental Protection and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, but nobody notified the public.

Mosaic says that their testing had indicated that the contamination had not spread, so the company decided it was unnecessary to alert surrounding properties, even though many of them use well water. Those neighbors, along with environmental groups and much of the public at large, were justifiably outraged by the silence.

One can easily forgive any Floridian who's been paying attention, for not giving the company the benefit of the doubt. Phosphate mining has ravaged many of the most vulnerable communities in our state, leaving behind a legacy of spoiled earth and toxic pollution. The companies that mine the rock, including Mosaic, don't have a great track record as stewards of our vital resources. Last October, Mosaic paid nearly $2 billion to settle a suit with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to pay for cleaning up operations at six sites in our state, including its Mulberry operation (along with two sites in Louisiana).

The settlement followed EPA accusations that Mosaic improperly stored and disposed of waste from the production of phosphoric and sulfuric acids. The EPA discovered that Mosaic was mixing highly-corrosive substances from the company's fertilizer operations with solid waste and wastewater from mineral processing, which violates federal and state laws. If what you've heard so far isn't bad enough, it's only part of a multidimensional problem.

Back in 2012, the Southwest Florida Water Management District granted Mosaic a permit to pump as much as 70 million gallons of groundwater each day for the next 20 years, some of which is used to dilute its toxic byproducts, so that it can dump them into creeks and streams without violating state limits.

You see, not only does phosphate mining produce acidic water and the toxic byproduct phosphogypsum–the storage of which threatens to contaminate water supplies after such spills– but the process is also incredibly water intensive, using unthinkable amounts of water from an aquifer already threatened by saltwater intrusion and groundwater modeling that suggests increased problems with sinkholes exactly like the one that caused this catastrophe. The word unsustainable comes to mind.


Just over a week before Mosaic says it discovered the leak, the company came before the Manatee County Commission and was issued a permit to expand their Manatee County operations in Duette. The northeast corner of Manatee County where the company has long mined phosphate rock at its Four Corners operation is not a part of the county that many residents ever even see and often goes out of sight and out of mind.