Great article in The Florida Phoenix by Craig Pittman.
“Piney Point has a long history of polluting the water and air around its location near Port Manatee, dating to when Borden — yes, the milk and glue company — built the plant in 1966. Just a year later, Borden was caught dumping waste into Bishop Harbor.
Piney Point has repeatedly changed hands since then, with each owner overseeing at least one pollution incident. At one point the state itself owned the plant and wound up loading millions of gallons of wastewater on board a barge, taking it miles offshore, and spraying it in the Gulf of Mexico.
That was in 2003. That summer, I was one of three reporters who spent days on end digging through documents in Tampa and Tallahassee to chart the history of the place. We wanted to find out how it had become, in the words of a top state official, “one of the biggest environmental threats in Florida history.”
Over and over, we found, state Department of Environmental Protection officials bent the rules or ignored warnings about problems, just to try to keep the fertilizer business open a little longer. They kept putting what was good for business ahead of what was good for the bay.”
To read the full article, visit: