News Archive

Betty Stancil remembers the day in 1986 when a giant dragline began ripping up the ground across the street, just 60 feet from her front door. Eight stories tall, blocking out the sun and swinging a bucket as big as her three-bedroom bungalow, the machine gouged up to 150 tons of earth with each pass. […]

DELTONA – Jeff Carine was driving to Daytona Beach to play golf Tuesday morning when his Toyota Camry hit a mushy, snowlike liquid covering Interstate 4. Carine, a golfer from Windermere, assumed it was a minor chemical spill and kept driving. Six hours later, he returned to the spot after hearing news throughout the day […]

TARPON SPRINGS – Two diverse neighbors share a small, peaceful cove along the Anclote River: a subdivision with a handful of homes and a defunct chemical plant with buried hazardous waste. A recently released report shows some contaminants from the 160-acre Stauffer Chemical Plant, closed for 13 years, may have seeped into Meyers Cove, shared […]

LAKELAND – Gases escaping from fertilizer company cooling ponds have been blamed for injuring orange trees and making cows teeth fall out after they eat tainted grass. But a Polk County company has invented a new way to recover a valuable commodity from the ponds, which DuPont says it is ready to buy. What’s more, […]

TAMPA – State environmental officials Friday began searching through records of a phosphate company and interviewing Polk County residents who said they became ill after breathing fumes from a mile-long gas cloud. State officials said US Agri-Chemical company near Fort Meade may be responsible for causing the gas cloud Wednesday over parts of Polk and […]

Normally, George Elder’s Brahman calves are worth $500 at birth. And during some 30 years he has lost only one calf at birth. This year, however, three calves have died shortly after birth and another three have been born almost too weak to nurse. Preliminary autopsy reports from a state lab indicate a combination of […]

The state department of Environmental Regulation will put monitoring equipment in the Keysville area to test air quality there, residents were told Friday night. Dr. Rick Garrity, district manager of DER’s office in Tampa, told about a dozen Keysville residents that the mobile air monitoring equipment would be available in early April for about three […]

After two years of limited study, local environmental officials have found amounts of fluoride in Hillsborough County pasture grass that “approach levels damaging to cattle” if animals graze on it for their lifetime. The effect of cattle grazing on grass with too much fluoride is a bone-brittling and tooth-mottling disease called fluorosis. Plants also can […]

LAKELAND, Fla., Aug. 11— A growing number of cities are facing severe shortages of fluoride additives used in water supplies to prevent tooth decay. Twelve cities in the West and Middle West, including Seattle, Youngstown, Ohio, and Green Bay, Wis., have been forced to halt their fluoridation programs, according to Arthur Jackson, a public health […]

Manatee, Hillsborough and Polk Counties suffer four times the fluoride air pollution burdens which apparently have caused acute fluorosis of cattle in Maryland as reported by the Washington Post in an article published Saturday in the Herald-Tribune. The impacts of the Florida pollution, however, have been carefully concealed by the phosphate companies from whose mills […]