cnn s nick valencia with that story. reporter: fishing boat captain dustin pack says he s never seen the red tide in tampa bay this bad. i hope that the worst is behind us in tampa bay. i pray that it is, but i m not holding my breath. reporter: the toxic blooms which cause fish kills and can be harmful to humans happen almost every year in and around florida s coast. but for the lifelong fisherman, this year is different. typically what happens is red tide happens offshore. with currents and tides or wind direction, it can be blown into the beach. what s different about this one is this started inside of tampa bay. reporter: back in the spring, 215 million gallons of wastewater were released into tampa bay from this plant to relieve pressure on a leaking reservoir. you can see cleanup is still under way. environmentalists say the disaster is fueling the red tide that we re seeing in tampa bay. now five organizations are suing the governor, the acting
secretary of florida s department of environmental protection, and the owners of piney point. they want the plant cleaned up and closed down safely so disasters of this magnitude never happen again. but governor ron desantis claims the science is pointing in a different direction. the scientific consensus is clear. it didn t cause the red tide. the red tide was here. reporter: the governor saying it was hurricane elsa in july and not piney point s wastewater which led to this year s historic fish kills. asked if he might be playing politics by not declaring a state of emergency over the red tide in tampa bay, desantis was defiant? how did i politicize red tide? they were the ones who were saying, you got to declare a state of emergency, and so we asked them, why? well, they didn t know why. the data are really clear that this algae bloom that was occurring in tampa bay started well before hurricane elsa passed by. reporter: maya burke with the tampa bay estuary program says w
Florida Department of Health in Pinellas County is cautioning beachgoers about possible effects from a patchy bloom of red tide reported in and offshore parts of the county’s Gulf coast.
Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission has been reporting a patchy bloom of the red tide organism, Karenia brevis, for the past several weeks. Concentrations in Pinellas had not been