Environmentalists urge DeSantis to declare Red Tide emergency

Environmentalists urge DeSantis to declare Red Tide emergency

ST. PETERSBURG — More than two dozen environmental organizations joined calls for Gov. Ron DeSantis to declare a state of emergency for the Tampa Bay area as Red Tide continues to leave dead fish along the coast and disrupt business across the region.

An executive order would help organize and finance Red Tide clean-up efforts, said a letter signed by 29 organizations and organized by the Center for Biological Diversity. The Ocean Conservancy sent a letter saying a statewide effort, rather than local governments scrambling to deal with the disaster, would help mitigate the catastrophe.

Florida is home to the majority of phosphate-mining operations in the United States — and the United States is the world's thirdleading producer of phosphate rock. Making matters worse, Florida also has the majority of the industry’s radioactive waste, phosphogypsum — one billion tons.

More than 1 billion tons of the radioactive waste are stored in 25 stacks scattered throughout Florida, perched precariously atop the Floridan aquifer — which supplies drinking water for 10 million people. There are 70 such stacks across the nation. These stacks are prone to sinkholes, breaches, and spills, and the industry struggles with how to deal with these risky radioactive mountains and the dire problems they cause.

More than half of all domestically sourced phosphate is mined in Florida, by an industry with a record of contaminating the environment through radioactive waste leakage and water pollution that threatens Florida's groundwater resources. Now there are plans to tear up more than 50,000 additional acres of central Florida with harmful strip-mining practices — and no plan to address the radioactive phosphogypsum stacks that have already been created.