More homeowners could join in on a federal class action lawsuit against Mosaic after a massive sinkhole at the Mulberry fertilizer plant.

Friday, federal officials from the Environmental Protection Agency will be at the site of the massive Mosaic sinkhole in Mulberry for the first time.

This is what the EPA is looking for during Friday’s visit:

— Observe the stack where sinkhole occurred.
— Observe the sampling occurring from production well 4.
— Discuss location of the additional four monitoring wells Mosaic will install soon.

It comes at the same time more homeowners are joining onto a class action lawsuit against the Mosaic fertilizer plant in Polk County.

Two law firms are partnering up to take on the company, accused of dumping radioactive chemicals into the Florida Aquifer, where we all get our drinking water.

The attorneys on this case tell us roughly 5,000 people live within five miles of the sinkhole and may be eligible to join the suit.

Mosaic has been testing homeowner’s wells and so far they haven’t found any contamination, but homeowners are hoping the suit will give them peace of mind in the future.

They’re upset that Mosaic took 3 weeks to alert homeowners about the spill, all while families in the area continued to drink water from their wells.

Why did they wait so long to alert the public? According to the Tampa Bay Times, a 2005 state law requires only that companies report contamination to the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) within ten days of learning about them. Then, The DEP has 30 days to tell residents. Mosaic has apologized for not telling people sooner, adding they immediately took steps to remove as much contaminated water as possible.

As of Friday morning, the class action suit includes three Lithia residents, all who have private wells: Nicholas Bohn, Natasha McCormick and Eric Weckman.

This isn’t the first time the company has been investigated. They had another massive sinkhole 22 years ago that dumped millions of gallons of polluted water into the water source and last year Mosaic was named in a 2-billion-dollar federal lawsuit for hazardous waste at the Mulberry plant.

The current lawsuit filed accuses Mosaic of dumping more than 200 million gallons of contaminated water, enough to fill 325 Olympic sized swimming pools, into the Floridan Aquifer, one of the state’s main underground sources of drinking water.

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