As Hurricane Milton mauled Florida’s west coast with effective winds and flooding rain, ecologists concern it might scatter the contaminated leftovers of the state’s phosphate fertilizer mining market and other harmful waste throughout the peninsula and into susceptible waterways.
More than 1 billion heaps of alittle radioactive phosphogypsum waste is kept in “stacks” that looklike massive ponds at danger for leakages throughout significant storms. Florida has 25 such stacks, most focused around massive phosphate mines and fertilizer processing plants in the main part of the state, and ecologists state almost all of them are in Milton’s predicted course.
“Placing susceptible websites so close on significant waterways that are at danger of damage from storms is a dish for catastrophe,” stated Ragan Whitlock, a personnel lawyer at the ecological group Center for Biological Diversity. “These are ticking time bombs.”
Phosphogypsum, a strong waste by-product from processing phosphate ore to make chemical fertilizer, consistsof radium, which decomposes to type radon gas. Both radium and radon are radioactive and can cause cancer. Phosphogypsum might likewise consistof hazardous heavy metals and other carcinogens, such as arsenic, cadmium, chromium, lead, mercury and nickel.
That waste is even more bothersome since there is no simple method to getridof of it, leaving it to stack up and endedupbeing an ever-growing target for such storms as the beast Milton, which made landfall in main Florida late Wednesday as a Category 3 storm, with continual winds of about 120 milesperhour (193 kph), a towering storm rise and 18 inches (46 centimeters) of rain.
A lower storm, Hurricane Frances, which hit the state’s eastern coast as a Category 2 and churned throughout main Florida in 2004, sentout 65 million gallons of acidic wastewater from phosphogypsum stacks into close-by waterways, killing thou