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| Let's go to the beach ! |
There's a mess getting worse right now in the middle of Florida. Phosphate mining leaves a mess behind. The toxic waste is dumped into vast retention ponds and forgotten about. When I say vast I'm not kidding. I always wondered what was behind the dike as I drove to Tampa. Miles and miles of dikes and I never knew I was just yards away from a potential flood of toxic waste.
I've noticed one other thing out on that road lately. The miles of cows and pastures with only the occasional prison or park to break up the monotony are now being punctuated by stoplights. Yeah, stoplights to mark the gated entrances of the new developments. So many new developments and I don't even want to think about that much traffic on a two lane country road.
Now you might think that a big toxic waste spill would make it harder to sell Mc-mansions. That might indeed slow things down, but only for a while. The mandatory evacuations and closing the only road to the west coast must be difficult for those who live there. The new people will forget soon enough or flip their houses and move on. Once the leaks get plugged it will be ancient history to the sales people in the new developments.
Of course the land value in the area will suffer. Maybe not as much as Tampa Bay will, if millions of gallons of this stuff gets flushed into the bay, but the prices will come down. The land for the next development will cost a whole lot less than the last one.
*** update here *** Change that "if" part above. They started sending the nasty stuff into the bay immediately. Change the millions part too. Sorry I was off a bit. Not by a decimal point but a couple of them. I believe so far they have sent somewhere around 300 million gallons into the bay.
Cleaning up the mess wont fix the problem. Mostly what that does it will let some people get even more rich. Developers get cheaper land prices and clean-ups don't come cheap. It will get a fix of some sort and the mess will get remediated but the problem will still be there.
The obvious problem are the massive ponds. They are prone to problems with leakage due to age and construction details. Another breach is inevitable. This isn't even the first one since the present owner bought the property. You might ask the obvious question, why would you want to buy a massive pool of toxic water anyway ? That question covers up a more important one though. Just like the toxic waste water covers the much more toxic and radioactive waste underneath the water ?
The obvious answer is money. The best kind of money. Other peoples money. The owner of a hedge fund used six million dollars of investors capital to buy the land. With the land as capital he secured a seventeen million dollar loan. When the darn thing leaked last time he used the investors money to buy enough time to declare bankruptcy. Now state is going to pay for this repair. That stinks just about as bad as the air in Tampa once the algae starts blooming.
Now that covers everything I think I know up to now. Perhaps my cynical take on the developers and land values was even sort of a stretch. But the thing that worries me isn't the certainty that this wont be the last leak. It's probable even that the next one or the one after will involve a massive breach that sucks the radioactive stuff out into environment. My concern is that on rare occasions, come in like the ones in the 1920s, all the ponds and all the toxins and all the radioactive waste will sweep across half the state like a radioactive squeegee. If a hurricane can blow Lake Okeechobee half way to the Gold Coast I'd say it's almost certain that one will do the same with these "retention" ponds.
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| Imagine this with radioactive sludge ! |
