Rainfall from Hurricane Florence flooded more than 1,200 roads to the point where authorities were telling motorists to avoid North Carolina entirely. The port city of Wilmington took a direct hit from Florence and essentially became an island, leaving officials scrambling for fuel to keep the water treatment plant running while a nearby sewage treatment plant spilled millions of gallons of waste into the Cape Fear River. Neighborhoods in several river towns were inundated by record flooding, 16 drinking water systems and seven sewage systems were out of service, and access to one nuclear plant that had been shut down was largely cut off, prompting an emergency declaration.
As overflowing rivers crest and the water starts to subside, the region will also have to contend with hazardous waste spread by the floodwater from inundated coal ash sites, hog waste lagoons and other factory farms that dot the region.
Clean-water advocates who surveyed the state by plane on Monday documented two breaches in a coal ash landfill near Wilmington, and found that giant ash piles near a power plant in another part of the state had been overcome by floodwater. They spotted dozens of hog farms with waste lagoons under water. One poultry company estimated that 1.7 million of its chickens had drowned and said its farmers hadn’t been able to reach millions more.
“Our riverkeepers are reporting flooding of Biblical proportions at historic levels,” said Donna Lisenby, a global advocacy manager for the Waterkeeper Alliance. “The rivers are going to see more impacts than ever before. That means more dead chickens and more dead hogs than ever before.”
A group of scientists that crunched preliminary numbers on the storm and the impact of climate change estimated that its extreme rainfall and size were significantly larger because of global warming. Both the rainfall and size of the storm have factored into Florence’s large impact on several states. At least 37 deaths had been blamed on the storm by Tuesday evening.
North Carolina was already well aware of the risk posed by hog waste lagoons. During Hurricane Floyd in 1999, 46 waste lagoons in the state failed, releasing millions of gallons of waste that contaminated tributaries of the Cape Fear, Neuse and Tar rivers, according to the group Environment America. In 2016, Hurricane Matthew caused 14 waste lagoons to fail, the group said.
Poultry farms, where chicken manure and urine contains ammonia and other pollutants, have also been inundated by Florence. Sanderson Farms reported Monday that 60 of its broiler houses had flooded, killing an estimated 1.7 million chickens, and it said it hadn’t been able to reach 30 other farms. The North Carolina Department of Agriculture reported Tuesday that at least 3.4 million chickens and turkeys and 5,500 hogs had died in the storm in that state.
Michael S. Regan, North Carolina’s top environmental regulator, said that the state Department of Environmental Quality had also received reports of spills at five hog waste lagoons in three counties north and west of Wilmington and that state inspectors would visit those and any others as soon as travel became safe.
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