The Mosaic Company noticed a dropping water level at their fertilizer facility in Mulberry, Florida on August 27th and notified state authorities. They didn’t notify the public for another 3 weeks and by then a large amount of "slightly radioactive water" had already leaked:
A sinkhole spanning 45 feet (13.7 meters) in diameter opened at a Mosaic Co phosphate fertilizer facility in Florida, leaking 215 million gallons of "slightly radioactive water," a company spokesman said on Friday.
Needless to say, people are questioning why it took the company three weeks to notify the public.
"It’s hard to trust them when they say 'Don’t worry,' when they’ve been keeping it secret for three weeks," she said.
The Floridan aquifer is massive and extends all the way to South Carolina, supplying much of Florida with their water:
The Floridan aquifer, as opposed to surficial aquifers, is the portion of the principal artesian aquifer that extends into Florida, parts of southern Alabama, southeastern Georgia, and southern South Carolina. In Georgia, it supplies the cities of Savannah and Brunswick. In Florida it supplies the cities of Daytona Beach, Deltona, Flagler Beach, Gainesville, Tampa, Jacksonville, Ocala, Orlando, St. Petersburg, and Tallahassee, several municipalities in South Florida, and numerous rural communities.
Residents are beginning to protest and question the reporting and clean-up process:
Jessica Broadbent lives a few miles from where the sinkhole swallowed all of that water.
“It’s going into our water supply,” she said. “It affecting our children. Our children’s children, eventually, our community. It affects our environment.”
She adds she is concerned about the lapse in time between when the sinkhole opened, and when the public was made aware of the issue.
“Oh, I’m very upset about that,” she said. “I think there should’ve been a hundred percent transparency. The minute there’s a leak, a sinkhole, whatever the case may be, there needs to be immediate community involvement and understanding so that there can be transparency. So it doesn’t look like a cover up because that’s what it looks like.”
The Minnesota-based Mosaic Company says it is trying to "recover" the radioactive water:
Mosaic is using ground water well P-4 to recover water that was lost as a result of the sinkhole formation. The well, which is 24-inches in diameter and 800 feet deep, is located west of the south gyp stack and is shown in the photo below.How’s it possible to recover radioactive water that has already seeped into the aquifer? Resident Bruce Mullins asked the same question in an interview with WFLA:
“If you drop 215 million gallons of water into a moving body of water, how in the world are you going to reclaim even a good portion of that much less any of it?” Mullins said. “I would like to see the science behind that and how they can prove that they have reclaimed this water.”
WFLA was able to capture video footage of what appears to be the water leaking into the aquifer, noting the stream of water was not seen in video from the day before. They also note the EPA and Florida environmental agencies kept a lid on the leak for three weeks as well. In the jaw-dropping interview below, a Mosaic rep says the clean-up process will take years, but everything is fine. Just. Fine. Nothing to see here.
x Embedded Content