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Enough wastewater to fill more than two Olympic swimming pools emptied into northern Tampa Bay Wednesday after a mishap during maintenance at a Clearwater treatment plant.

City officials told the Tampa Bay Times they had to divert an estimated 1.4 million gallons of partially treated wastewater into the bay after a settling tank designed to remove solids from water became overloaded.

Staff at Clearwater’s east treatment facility took water quality samples and “immediately began to assess any potential environmental impacts” after the spill, Rob Simpson, a Clearwater spokesperson, said in an emailed statement. As of Friday, there was no public health risk, he said.

Simpson said the “unanticipated process” happened during regular maintenance, when one settling tank was temporarily down for cleaning and a second tank became overloaded.

That caused solid matter to clog filters and plant workers opted to send the wastewater through a pipe that empties into the bay until the tank came back online, Simpson said.

Plant employees reported the spill to state environmental regulators who track pollution events across Florida’s 67 counties. The report says the issue was detected Wednesday night, and staff solved the problem by Thursday morning.

The city plant where the spill occurred is located on the western end of the Courtney Campbell Causeway. The wastewater emptied into Old Tampa Bay, a section of the estuary that is now seeing a historic-low amount of seagrass after losing more than 320 acres over the past two years.

Seagrass is considered a “canary in the coal mine” for the health of the Tampa Bay estuary as the aquatic plant helps stem pollution and fends off coastal erosion. Old Tampa Bay faces a range of threats, from pollution to slow-moving tides that aren’t doing enough to flush out dirty water.

That part of the bay has 23% less seagrass than when tracking began there in 1988, according to recent survey results from the Southwest Florida Water Management District.

“There’s places in Old Tampa Bay where there were lush seagrass beds for a number of years, and now it’s barren,” Ed Sherwood, executive director of the Tampa Bay Estuary Program, told the audience at a recent Tampa Bay Times water quality discussion.

As a standalone event, 1.4 million gallons of wastewater is on the high end of volume from recent one-off spills that have plagued the bay.

But as Florida’s largest open-water estuary, the waterway saw an influx of pollution after back-to-back hurricanes last fall. The estuary program estimated more than 40 million gallons of combined sewage overflowed in October as a hurricane one-two punch overwhelmed the region’s wastewater facilities.

Seven FL men and a NJ man are being accused in a social media child porn probe that links to a ring leader in Turkey.

Amanda Lumpkin, Patch Staff

|Updated Wed, Apr 9, 2025 at 10:55 pm ET

FLORIDA — Eight men were recently arrested in connection with an international child porn ring that included selling and buying online child sexual abuse material, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier said this week.

Uthmeier on Monday announced a group, led by Turkish resident Mehmet Berk Bozuyuk, was accused of transferring "massive amounts" of the material to buyers consisting of eight men - seven of which were in Florida.

“... Every image of child abuse leaves a lasting scar on an innocent life, and we will aggressively prosecute these heinous crimes,” Uthmeier said in a news release. “It’s disgusting that child sexual abuse material is advertised in plain view on apps such as TikTok, and we will continue fighting to get these major social media companies to do their part in shutting down the spread of this material."

An undercover investigation uncovered the global operation, Uthmeier said. Investigators who responded to a single ad for at least 6 terabytes of material for $100 received more than 1 million images and videos, all child sexual abuse material, Uthmeier said.

Additionally, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement had a website's domain seized and redirected to the state department in an attempt to "hinder the further distribution of child sexual abuse material," Uthmeier said.

Find out what's happening in Clearwaterfor free with the latest updates from Patch.

People who profited from selling the child sexual abuse material were identified, and at least four of them were money mules who took money from Florida buyers, Uthmeier said. The mules would then pocket a percentage of the funding and send the rest to Bozuyuk in Turkey, Uthmeier said.

Bozuyuk was then accused of filtering the money by buying "access to unsuspecting victims’ financial accounts through the dark web before taking possession," Uthmeier said.

“This case is a testament to the power of law enforcement teamwork and the strength of interagency collaboration,” FDLE Commissioner Mark Glass said in the release. “To the criminals believing they can hide among the shadows of the internet — know this: FDLE is always watching, we are always working and we will always find you.”

The following were arrested on charges of:

Warrants have been issued to charge Bozuyuk with RICO, conspiracy to commit RICO, money laundering, 13 counts of promotion of sexual performance by a child 10 images or more, 11 counts of selling child pornography, 13 counts of out-of-state transmission of child pornography by electronic device, 13 counts of distribution of obscene material and nine counts of use of two-way communication device, Uthmeier said.

Furthermore, Oregon resident Xiomara Del Real Maqueda faces a singular charge of conspiracy to commit money laundering, Uthmeier said.

It was not immediately known if they had been arrested.

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