When I worked in aerial photo, one of our biggest customers was the phosphate industry, which operated strip mines in the area we called "the boneyard" in west central Florida. We flew missions to calculate stockpile volumes, overburden to be moved around, and other routine bookkeeping for the phosphate pits.

One day we were called in to do an emergency photo mission to document a huge sinkhole that had opened up in a pit (strip mines are often a land section (a sq mi) in area, filled with slurry (that's how they move the ore around, by pumping it). The sinkhole had allowed the water to pour directly into the aquifer, most of central Florida is old beach sand over limestone, and the latter is riddled with caves and underground rivers. The aerial photo showed a dozen bulldozers hastily filling up a sinkhole several hundred feet across in the middle of a pit. BTW, the pits are surrounded by berms and planted trees so they can't be seen from the road. But you can see the Boneyard clearly from space, check the area SE of Tampa, S of Lakeland on Google Earth. Its a couple of hundred square miles of planetary exploitation. You can't miss it.

Within a few days, people on the Gulf coast were complaining of milky sediment in their well and municipal water, and the sediment showed phosphate and toxic concentrations of Uranium and Radium and decay products of these radioactive substances. The phosphate in Florida has enough Uranium in it that it is economically recoverable when the ore is refined to the industrial commodities derived from it: fertilizer and phosphoric acid. Nobody knew why this was so, the press treated it as a big mystery, but of course, we knew exactly what was going on.

I felt so bad about this I decided to play whistle-blower. A friend of mine's wife worked for Swiftmud (South West Florida Water Management District), so I called her up and told her what was happening, and that I could produce photographic negatives to back up my claim if she could make sure they were delivered to the right people.

She stopped me in mid-sentence. "Don't even think about it, ER, you'll never work again in Florida if you breathe a word of this to anybody, and you'll probably go to jail for theft of company property; the authorities will deny everything. We know about this, everybody knows about this, all the way to Tallahassee. Big Phosphate has political clout, and everybody is working together to keep this story under the rug."

I've always felt like a coward for not taking my pictures to the press, but to be honest, I have no guarantee they weren't on the mines' payroll as well.