![]() ![]() Unprecedented cooperation over decades culminated in Tampa Bay becoming a national model for restoration and the success of the Clean Water Act. Political will made Tampa Bay one of the nation’s shining examples of how a region could come together - with local, state and federal government working with citizens, NGOs and industry to clean up water pollution. Manatees reached the brink of extinction. The decades that followed saw some of the worst fish kills in Florida history. Nearly half of the Bay’s seagrasses were wiped out by 1982. The pollution ruining the silver was ruining sea life too. “Women along Bayshore in the 1950s and 1960s were complaining regularly that not only did it tarnish the silver - but it would erode silver.”Īctivism from those kinds of wealthy homeowners, Bennett said, made politicians take notice of a dying Bay. “It’s some of the nicest real estate in Tampa, and it was almost uninhabitable,” said Evan Bennett, a Florida Atlantic University history professor working on an environmental history of Tampa Bay. Industries, farms and local governments dumped waste into the bay and its connecting waterways - even raw sewage. Through much of the 20th century, well into the 1970s, phosphate plants and coal-burning power plants pumped sulfur dioxide into the skies over Tampa Bay without opposition. They knew the culprit was coming from the Bay, but had no idea exactly what it was. Socialites living on Bayshore Boulevard, one of the most coveted water-front addresses in the city, watched their silver dishes, silverware and heirlooms tarnish. The burnt-rotten stench of sulfur hung over Tampa Bay. ![]()
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