Acid Water Agreement Eases Threat To River MULBERRY, FL (WUSF) - Two phosphate plants in Polk County have agreed to take hundreds of millions of gallons of highly acidic water from the shuttered Mulberry Phosphates plant. The water will be transferred during the summer rainy season, alleviating fears that the water may overflow into the Alafia River.

As many as a million fish may have died when a pond containing the process water spilled into the river in 1997. The water is a byproduct of fertilizer production.

The deal is good news to attorney Ron McClain. He represents several groups of riverside residents who sued Mulberry Phosphates, which has since foreclosed. He says he canoes the Alafia regularly and saw the effects of the 1997 spill first-hand.

McCLAIN: It really shows a dichotomy between those corporations that are just in business for profit without any environmental safeguards or considerations, as opposed to those who are good corporate members of our community and are environmentally responsible and run that way.

A pipeline will be built to siphon 300 million gallons to a nearby Cargill Fertilizer plant. It should take eight weeks to build, says Gray Gordon, the company's vice president. He says the project should protect the Alafia.

GORDON: While we're a competing industry, the phosphate industry itself is made up of only six companies in the Florida area. So whenever one company has a problem, it reflects on the others. And we want to insure that we don't have any type of incident with process water being released from a gypsum storage area.

Mr. Gordon says Cargill has excess storage capacity, in part because of the lack of rain.

IMC-Agrico has also agreed to take about 60 million gallons of acidic water - one truckload at a time. Bob Kinsey, the company's director of technical services, said it should last until September.

KINSEY: We're obviously concerned about the issues at Mulberry Phosphates and the amount of process water they have and the proximity of that facility to the Alafia River, so we have the room at New Wales and South Pierce and we're certainly willing to help. The deal with state environmental regulators was brokered by the Florida Phosphate Council. John Joyce is director of communications for the industry group.

JOYCE: The council viewed this as an industry situation that needed our attention from an industry perspective and that's why the council came in.

The money to pay for the project will be taken from a fund used to restore old mines. It will be repaid through a bill approved this year by the legislature, which set up a contingency fund for emergencies. Phosphate companies will pay $75,000 into the fund for every one of their phosphogypsum stacks for the next five years.

JOYCE: We felt like it was incumbent upon us to come to the table with the Department of Environmental Protection and make sure that the money's there should we have the need.

There are no official estimates for the project's cost. But a state environmental official says $4 million has been budgeted for the project through June and another $16 million for the next year.

Meanwhile, a state research agency has proposed neutralizing future spills with lime. The Florida Institute of Phosphate Research conducts studies on ways to lessen the impact of mining. Scientist Mike Lloyd said some freshwater fish would still be killed with lime, because there are also salts in spilled process water. But it would only kill fish in one area, instead of the entire river.

LLOYD: This is the best thing you could do in an emergency when there is a spill, because it will make sure you have a greater survival than just letting the acid water go down the creek.

Since phosphate plants don't have the proper storage areas for lime, Mr. Lloyd says stockpiles could be set up at limerock mines and trucked in during a spill.

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