FLORIDA REGULATORS LEAVE STATE LITTERED WITH TOXIC TIME BOMBS

Article from Who What Why by CHRIS ROBERTS, April 13, 2021

An enormous, privately owned reservoir at a decommissioned fertilizer plant was leaking and at risk of collapse. If it breached, more than 400 million gallons of mildly radioactive, highly toxic water could rush towards homes, businesses, and Tampa Bay.

“This is not acceptable. This is not something we will allow to persist,” said the governor, who vowed “full enforcement” against HRK Holdings, which had purchased the property in Piney Point in 2006 and used the reservoirs to store dredging waste scraped from the bay floor from nearby Port Manatee. 

But HRK had declared bankruptcy after another leak in 2011 — one of at least three major discharges from the toxic reservoir since the fertilizer plant closed in 2001. 

How Florida would manage to pursue a case against an allegedly broke corporate entity, DeSantis did not say. “We’ll never get a nickel out of them,” Manatee County Commissioner Kevin Van Ostenbridge later told the Miami Herald.

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