Is the Mosaic waste pile too big to fail?

The Mosaic mound of waste crisis is apparently over.  Although maybe someone can explain why this is the acceptable level of comfort.

The movement of the waste pile, which is about 185 feet tall and has its own nighttime warning lights for aircraft, had  raised worries early this year from state and federal regulators concerned about the integrity of a large lake inside the pile. The lake holds hundreds of millions of gallons of acidic and radioactive process water.

Regulators and the company now say the risk of a catastrophic failure and release of the water is minimal.

The movement of parts of the pile's north wall and the earth deep beneath that wall have slowed significantly after a series of emergency measures. The movement went from more than a half-inch per day to one-tenth to one-hundredth of an inch per day, on average, state reports show.

The fertilizer company had slowed production while "responding to" the wobbling wastewater lake which itself may present a problem because...

A halt in production affects the company's ability to manage the supply of the process water on site, company officials have previously said. Rainfall expands that supply while continued fertilizer production causes the water to evaporate.

Leave aside the question of whether or not it's good to just let the "acidic and radioactive" waste evaporate into the open air.  Are they telling us here that the only way to stave off environmental disaster is to make sure production doesn't shut down? 

Gutter buddies

From LaToya's pre-Carnival pep talk today:

Another new feature headed to parade routes is called a "gutter buddy," which is a sandbag placed in front of catch basins to prevent beads and other items from flowing in and clogging them.

Actually, these were a "new feature" last year along the parade routes uptown.  Here's what they look like.



Those didn't appear to be sandbags, though. Maybe they're going heavy duty this time around.  Hope it doesn't rain too hard while they're deployed. We do still have a drainage problem to worry about. And the "gutter buddies" are supposed to be good at plugging up culverts. 

Mosaic thinks so, anyway.

A fertilizer plant in St. James Parish is siphoning hazardous wastewater out of a retaining pond to try to prevent the possible collapse of a retaining wall, but also preparing to respond if it cannot prevent the failure, records show. A letter from the Mosaic Uncle Sam fertilizer plant to the Environmental Protection Agency outlined preparations to try to prevent the wastewater from contaminating surrounding wetlands if the wall collapses.

The plans include installing or staging plugs for nearby culverts to try to contain the wastewater, should it be released, according to a letter to the EPA date Jan. 30.

The waste water is sitting behind a 200 foot wall of gypsum right now.  That's a pretty big gutter buddy itself.  I'm sure some sandbags will be fine if that fails, though.

Qatar on the bayou

It's hard to crack into the WSJ archives. This was one of my very favorite op-eds of theirs that wasn't penned by Bobby Jindal.  That link runs up against the paywall, though.  I happened to pull the funny quote from it at the time. But also here is a site where the full text is preserved. Anyway, here is what I'm talking about.

So let’s put it this way: We are building a Qatar on the Bayou. From whole cloth, companies are laying new cities of fertilizer plants, boron manufacturers, methanol terminals, polymer plants, ammonia factories and paper-finishing facilities. In computer renderings, the Sasol site looks like a fearsome, steel-fitted Angkor Wat.

Now the environmental website where the text of this article is preserved has added photos, links and commentary to recontextualize things a bit. But in its original form it was pretty clear this  "Qatar on the Bayou" iteration was meant as a compliment.  Understandably, not everyone takes it as such. 

While the Sasol project described above has since been scaled back, the chemical boom in South Louisiana has nevertheless persisted... much to everyone's great excitement in St. James Parish.

CONVENT — Shouting "shut it down" on the front lawn of Mosaic Fertilizer's administrative office, a collection of St. James Parish residents, outside environmental activists and pastors called Wednesday for the state to close the Uncle Sam plant with its endangered lake of hazardous water threatening surrounding land and waterways.

Company officials and state regulators have been scrambling for several weeks to prevent a catastrophic release of more than 700 million gallons of the acidic process water held inside an enormous lake atop a 200-foot high pile of the company's waste byproduct outside Convent.

I've been watching this story all week and I'm still not sure if the "process water" threatens to contaminate the river if it slips loose.  I only ask because I am concerned it might not be so great at cooling turbines. 

More to the point, though...

More pointedly, the local group Rise St. James and other activists urged the state to halt continued permitting of any new industrial operations in St. James Parish, like the $9.4 billion Formosa complex proposed across the Mississippi River in Welcome or the $1.2 billion Wanhua complex proposed across the street from the Mosaic waste pile.

"As Rise St. James and as the residents of St. James have said repeatedly, St. James is full, and nothing shows it more clearly than this facility that needs to be shut down now," said Anne Rolfes, director of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade. "You can't handle what you got, don't bring in any more."

Gail Leboeuf, a Convent resident who grew up near the pile, said she watched the plant being built and watched the pile rise higher and higher through the years.

One could almost call it the Angkor Wat of gypsum if one wanted to keep the metaphor going.  But why would we want to do that?  It was all mixed up in the first place.  The Angkor Wat is in Cambodia and we're trying to be Qatar.. right?  Maybe we need to just stop.