At some point, we all reach that point.
My point was Piney Point.
Five years ago, I watched a major economic disaster unfold literally in my backyard. About 10 minutes down the road from me, a gypsum retention stack filled with somewhere between 400 and 700 million gallons of acidic and radioactive water courtesy of an abandoned fertilizer plant had a catastrophic breach and is dumping all of its contents into the Little Manatee watershed on its way to Tampa Bay.
This included my “home water” of Cockroach Bay.
It made me unbelievably pissed because I wondered what was gonna happen to my new favorite place to take my little kayak out. It most certainly wouldn’t be good.
Officials were notified that a potential breach of the south reservoir could flood roads and homes and wash into Tampa Bay. Governor Ron DeSantis issued a State of Emergency. Officials ordered the evacuation of more than 300 homes and closed off U.S. Highway 41 near the reservoir.
The decision made by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection — the agency responsible for protecting Florida’s waters — was to start pumping. Contaminated water was pumped from the reservoir and discharged into Tampa Bay at the rate of 22,000 gallons per minute in an effort to prevent the collapse of the reservoir, which threatened to destabilize two adjacent pools storing more hazardous wastewater.For 10 straight days, approximately 215 million gallons of wastewater from Piney Point were released into Tampa Bay.
Tampa Bay is a nitrogen-limited estuary, meaning that excess nitrogen directly fuels algal blooms. The system cannot absorb a year’s worth of nitrogen in ten days without consequences.
The consequences arrived on schedule. By mid April, researchers began to observe an algae bloom around the Piney Point discharge site. In May and June, abnormal large floating mats of filamentous cyanobacteria appeared just south of Tampa Bay. Then came the red tide. 2021 saw the highest concentrations of red tide in the area since 1971, creating heavy fish kills and pushing people from the beach as neurotoxins from the algae caused eyes and noses to burn. Two months following the release, Tampa Bay experienced a red tide that killed more than 600 tons of marine life in Pinellas and Hillsborough counties.
As I was reading about how such a massive fuckup like this could happen and I came across a picture of this yacht, a 116’ Azimut Vivere. It made me infuriatingly pissed off.
That yacht, which cost $4.5 million used, belongs to Phil Rinaldi.
Rinaldi was the former CEO of Mulberry Phosphate that ran the former fertilizer plant. When the business was no longer profitable, Rinaldi declared bankruptcy for the company and literally just walked away in 2001, leaving the 700-acre facility and its 30-feet deep lakes of poisonous fertilizer byproduct to a shell company HRK Holdings, and the whims of time and nature.
Phosphogypsum is radioactive waste derived from processing phosphate ore into phosphoric acid. Radium-226, found in phosphogypsum, has a 1,600-year radioactive decay half-life. In addition to radioactive materials, it can contain carcinogens and toxic heavy metals including arsenic, cadmium, lead, and mercury.
It wasn’t the first time he had done that. That was sort of his business model. He would start a subsidiary company, make a shit ton of money and then declare bankruptcy as soon as it stopped being profitable. Him and his backers from the Carlyle Group would walk away financially unscathed. Before Mulberry, Rinaldi was part of a company called Seminole Phosphate. They caused a massive ecological disaster in Plant City before closing up shop.
After Mulberry, Rinaldi started a company called Philadelphia Energy Solutions. Remember that huge refinery explosion a couple years ago? That was them. They again just declared bankruptcy and walked away.
The Piney Point disaster was something that the smart folks have been expecting since at least 2003. The abandoned site has cost taxpayers over $150 million to keep this exact thing from happening. It happened any way.
https://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20030716/News/605216898?template=ampart
All of us in our tiny boats were left wondering just how bad it was gonna get. Except Rinaldi, who is a billionaire three times over. He just kept cruising around in his yacht somewhere off the coast of Italy.
A federal judge found HRK Holdings liable for a major pollution event and ordered the company to pay $846,900. U.S. District Judge William Jung found that HRK had violated the Clean Water Act by discharging pollutants into Tampa Bay without a lawfully issued permit. The judgment was largely symbolic. HRK Holdings was a broke, empty shell company, and their only asset is land contaminated with toxic metals and slightly radioactive muck.
But I guess that has been the point all along.
There are different sets of rules and realities.
Unfortunately, it usually is decided by who has the larger boat.