Hurricane Florence hit the East Coast hard, causing millions of dollars of damage to roads and bridges. Both North and South Carolina were rocked by the storm, which was only the latest in a series of storms that have damaged their infrastructure. After the worst of the floodwaters have subsided, Carolinians are left with difficult questions: what exactly was damaged, and how can we mitigate the impact of the next big storm?
Like the storms that came before it, Florence washed out roads and bridges. But one of the biggest casualties in the recent storm may have been the state’s waste infrastructure, as the flooding spread toxic runoff from industrial sites towards local river systems. The failures could spread illness and add to the hurricane’s death toll, another blow to battered survivors.
The case for stronger protections on disposal infrastructure is obvious. But for anyone looking to solve the state’s waste woes, the answers are harder and costlier than they might like.
Background
The hurricane isn’t a first for the Carolinas. In 2015, they were hit with almost two feet of rain in a matter of days. The two states’ infrastructure took a beating, most notably when more than 40 dams in South Carolina collapsed, contributing to the flooding. Just a year later, Hurricane Matthew took out another 25 dams. Some of the roads and bridges that were destroyed by the flooding have still not been repaired.
Even still, Florence rocked the state harder than expected. Many residents were lulled into a false sense of security because it was only a Category 1 storm, but the rain hit the state with far more destructive power than the winds, approaching 50cm (20in). In the middle of last week, North Carolina’s Cape Fear River peaked at 61 feet, 40 to 50 feet above normal. In terms of rain, Florence was a thousand-year storm, meaning a storm that has a 0.1 percent chance of occurring in any given year.
After the worst of the storm had subsided, on September 20th, South Carolina’s governor formally asked for $1.2 billion in federal aid. According to the state government, the request is based off early estimates of the damage.
Where is the Waste from?
North Carolina is home to a large farming industry, including 2,100 industrial hog farms. On those farms, the hog manure is stored in lagoons: essentially, clay-lined pits where farmers keep water and manure. In these “lagoons,” bacteria break the hog waste down into methane, carbon dioxide, and a fertilizer that farmers later spray on their fields.
Last week, the rising stormwaters took their toll on the lagoons, many of which were built on low-lying land near the ocean. As of September 21st, North Carolina’s Department of Environmental Quality reported that six of the state’s lagoons had sustained structural damage, 23 of them had floodwater rising above them, and 31 of them actually had waste flowing out of the lagoon.
The sewage spill poses a potential health hazard. Manure lagoons are breeding grounds for E. coli and other antibiotic-resistant bacteria, while also being extremely high in ammonia and nitrates. The bacteria are a serious problem, as humans and hogs are similar enough that people can contract hog-borne diseases.
The North Carolina Pork Council released a statement saying that they did not believe that the manure lagoons would cause “widespread impacts.” But for observers like Michael Malli, the research coordinator for the Lower Cape Fear River Program, these lagoons are unsafe even at the best of times, and downright dangerous during storms. “Dumping raw swine waste into open pits and spraying it out on fields is not an effective way to treat nutrient and pathogen-rich waste, it is only the cheapest,” Mallin said. “Since hundreds of such waste lagoons are on the low-lying Coastal Plain, they are pollution time bombs waiting to go off in this hurricane-prone region.”
In addition to the manure distributed by the stormwaters, the water was polluted on a different front: the state estimates that 3.4 million chickens and 5,500 pigs were killed after they were not evacuated from the storm. Their carcasses, left in the rising water, are also a source of pollution.
Not all of the waste released into the floodwaters was animal waste. According to Reggie Cheatham, director of the EPA's Office of Emergency Management, untreated human sewage had been introduced into the waters by sewer manhole failures and a power failure at a water treatment plant.
But perhaps the most serious pollutant was the coal ash released at a local power plant. Coal ash is one of the by-products of burning coal at a power plant. The ash contains toxic metals like mercury, selenium and arsenic, and it can be disposed of either as a liquid left in ponds, or a solid that is sent to landfills. In liquid disposal (the cheaper method), companies fill a pond with fly ash slurry and let the water evaporate to create solid fly ash.
A Duke Energy plant in N.C. had failures of both methods during Hurricane Florence. Last weekend, the company announced that the heavy rain had caused an ash landfill to erode and spill 2,000 cubic yards of waste onto a roadway. Apparently, the company identified “slope failure” and “erosion” after about a foot of rain fell on the site.
Then, on Friday, floodwaters started flowing over the earthen dam around nearby Sutton Lake, causing the lake to over top two of the plant’s ash basins. Ash by-products mixed with the water of the lake, turning the surface grey. Company spokesperson Paige Sheehan said that the company can’t discount the possibility that ash is flowing into the nearby river.
This is not the company's first disastrous spill in the area; in 2014, a plant in Eden, N.C. suffered a broken drainage pipe under a waste pit, which led to a spill that turned 70 miles of the nearby Dan River grey. In that case, the company pled guilty to nine Clean Water Act violations, and was made to pay $102 million in fines.
It is difficult to know the total impact of the ash as of now, as the still-high stormwaters have made it difficult to get in. “Once the damage is assessed,” the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality said in a statement last week, “DEQ will determine the best path forward and hold the utility accountable for implementing the solution that ensures the protection of public health and the environment.”
Lessons Learned?
The pollutants have hit the two states’ water systems hard. As of September 17th, the EPA reported that at least 23 drinking water systems in North Carolina weren’t supplying water, and 21 others were operating “with restrictions.” The lack of a regular clean water supply, combined with flooded roads preventing deliveries, meant that many stranded Carolinians weren’t able to get any clean water for days after the flood.
Naturally, government officials are looking for ways to prevent this from happening in the next big storm. But while there are answers, none of them are convenient.
The first possible answer is stricter regulations on how companies store and dispose of waste. After Duke’s disastrous ash spill in 2015, the federal government changed the laws surrounding solid waste treatment, giving the EPA more say in how coal ash is disposed of. Currently, the EPA is not strictly investigating coal disposal, and the administration has said that they will review the law. And hog waste disposal laws are similarly lax: hog facilities are not legally required to move, even after they are flooded. And while North Carolina law now bans new hog-farming facilities from using “lagoon and sprayfield” methods of handling their waste, there’s no legal requirement to change existing facilities.
The other major solution is perhaps even more controversial: cede the shoreline to the ocean in what scientists are beginning to call a “managed retreat.”
Global climate change has made the coasts more storm-prone in the past few years which has led to serious coastal property destruction. In North Carolina alone, there are 1,132 “severe repetitive loss properties”: properties that flood every two to three years and are continually rebuilt. A prime example of this rebuilding is Wrightsville Beach, in N.C. The popular tourist beach survived the hurricane because of a process called “beach renourishment,” where the government dumps sand back onto eroded beaches to build them back up. The US Army Corps of Engineers has been renourishing Wrightsville Beach every four years for the past 30 years, and spent $9 million on the practice last winter alone.
Observers like retired geology professor Orrin Pilkey are concerned about the long-term cost of measures like renourishment. Pilkey believes that beach nourishment will be unsustainable within decades as the ocean continues to rise, and that politicians need to think more long-term. He also thinks the government should begin restricting property development along the waterline, avoid rebuilding storm-destroyed buildings, and plan an organized retreat from the ocean. “We must take the long view and respond now to the rising sea in a planned fashion,” Pilkey stated in an op-ed for N.C.’s News and Observer earlier this month. “Currently the unspoken plan is to wait until the situation is catastrophic and then respond. We must begin the retreat now.”
But it’s very unlikely that Carolinian politicians will take his advice seriously. In 2012, North Carolina now-famously banned state agencies from using a report showing severe sea rises when writing their policy. Much of the force behind the ban was the worry that the report findings would negatively impact oceanfront property values. And even after the devastation from Hurricane Florence, few politicians are taking the idea of managed retreat seriously.
In a statement on the hurricane, North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper cited waste facility failures as one of the most serious infrastructural impacts of the storm. Cooper acknowledged that the rebuilding process would be difficult, expensive work, and concluded, “there’s a lot we need to do to shore up our infrastructure.” Hopefully, some of that work will involve making hard decisions about the security and location of their infrastructure so that the hard-won lessons of Florence won’t go to waste.