Florida’s Piney Point is the latest predicted disaster. Maybe we should start listening to these folks?
By Peter Dykstra, Environmental Health News
I’ve been a member of a worthy non-profit, The Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ), since one year after its 1991 founding.
Every once in a while, I pester its 1,200 members to consider a special award for I-told-you-so reporting—honoring an environment reporter who shouts into the winds of political clout or simple indifference to a looming disaster.
Arguably, the best-known American example of this is Mark Schleifstein, the veteran New Orleans scribe who said his Times-Picayune boss dismissed his hurricane warnings as “disaster porn” until Hurricane Katrina nearly took New Orleans off the map.
I wrote about Schleifstein and several more exemplars in a 2017 piece for Ensia, “Forewarned.”
This month, a new entry came in—one with a roughly 18 year lead time.
In 2003, St. Petersburg Times reporters Craig Pittman, Julie Hauserman, and Candace Rondeaux filed a story about gypsum “stacks,” the benign-sounding name for highly acidic waste heaps from phosphate mining operations. The reporters followed a twisted tale of bankruptcies, lax government oversight, and a potentially major threat to ecologically sensitive areas of Tampa Bay. Their focus was the waste area called Piney Point.
In March, the warnings about Piney Point became reality. About one-third of the nearly half-billion gallons of highly contaminated water had leaked from the site.
When Pittman followed up on the site this year, he did so from a decidedly different platform. His 30-year career at the paper (it’s the Tampa Bay Times now) ended with a staff reduction last year. He’s now a columnist for the nonprofit startup Florida Phoenix.
So since no Pulitzer Prize yet exists for I-told-you-so, let’s award our first mythical prize to Pittman, Hauserman, and Rondeaux. It’s no comfort to journalists to be vindicated in this way, but it’s a useful reminder that we often ignore their warnings.
Hall of fame
Or maybe what’s needed is a Hall of Fame for environmental reporters. Environmental pursuits, whether by journalists, scientists, or activists, have enough of a history and track record that someone ought to be keeping score.
Here are some, in no particular order:
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