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babylonsister

(171,101 posts) Wed Sep 12, 2018, 04:12 PM Sep 2018

Pierce: Hurricane Florence Could Be That Much Worse Because of What's Waiting for It on Land

Hurricane Florence Could Be That Much Worse Because of What's Waiting for It on Land
There are lagoons of pig shit and coal ash in North Carolina—courtesy of Republican deregulation.
By Charles P. Pierce
Sep 12, 2018

Since for the next couple of days, we're all going to be watching as those clever Chinese climate hoaxers turn Cape Hatteras into the Bay of Hatteras, we should all remember that, in our deregulatory era of business-friendly state economies, every major storm of the sort that's lining up outside the southeastern United States this week brings with it an environmental threat because of something that's already on land, waiting.

There were nine federal SuperFund sites in the direct path of Hurricane Katrina when it hit Louisiana. The Environmental Protection Agency (Remember those guys? They were important once.) monitored 247 SuperFund sites when Sandy visited New Jersey and New York City. And, in a terrific series published last spring, reporters from The Houston Chronicle revealed that the toxic spillage and environmental damage done when Hurricane Harvey roared into the petrochemical corridor in that city was far worse than anyone had let on at the time.

In all, reporters cataloged more than 100 Harvey-related toxic releases—on land, in water and air. Most were never publicized, and in the case of two of the biggest releases, Arkema and Magellan, the extent or potential toxicity was initially understated.

Only a handful of the industrial spills have been investigated by federal regulators, the news organizations found. Texas regulators say they have investigated 89 incidents, but they have yet to announce any enforcement action. Testing by state and federal regulators of soil and water for contaminants was largely limited to Superfund toxic waste sites...

Local officials say the state’s industry-friendly approach, in particular, has weakened efforts by the city of Houston and surrounding Harris County to build cases against and force cleanup by the companies, many of them repeat environmental offenders.

“The public will probably never know the extent of what happened to the environment after Harvey,” said Rock Owens, supervising environmental attorney for Harris County. “But the individual companies of course know."

Floyd was a Category 2 storm when it struck North Carolina in 1999 and it was the worst natural disaster in the state's history.

Comes now Florence into the Carolinas, a Category 3 at least, and into the newly insane state of North Carolina in particular, and the major environmental concern on the ground and away from the coast is pig shit. Gallons and gallons of it. Lagoons of the stuff—10 billion pounds a year, if the Waterkeeper Alliance folks are right about their estimate. And, as Quartz reminds us, we have smelled this movie before.

[In] 2016, Hurricane Matthew inundated 14 hog manure lagoons. In the days leading up to the hurricane’s landfall, some farmers pumped waste out of their lagoons and hauled it away in an effort to limit the damage. Hurricane Floyd in 1999 did much worse, flooding “dozens” of hog lagoons and causing half a dozen lagoons’ containing walls to fail. The liquid waste that escaped eventually wound up in estuaries, and was blamed for algae blooms and fish kills.

Meanwhile, as NPR tells us, farmers are scrambling to pump out the waste ahead of the storm. It is said that the lagoons can take up to 36 inches of rain before the flooding becomes acute; most forecasts predict Florence to drop at least that much on North Carolina, especially if the storm stalls, as it might. But that's not the worst case scenario. This is the worst case scenario.

Water starts overflowing and erodes the lagoon wall, causing a wall to collapse, spreading animal waste across the landscape and into rivers. Rising rivers could also inundate some low-lying lagoons and hog houses. About 60 of them lie within what the state of North Carolina considers the 100-year-flood plain. Animals in those houses may need to be evacuated for the flood waters rise.

And, as if the hog farm and the manure lagoons weren't enough to worry about, there are the coal ash reservoirs, too. From CNBC:

Also of concern are more than two dozen massive coal ash pits operated by Duke Energy, the state's primary electricity provider. The gray ash that remains after coal is burned contains potentially harmful amounts of mercury, arsenic and lead. Since power plants need vast amounts of water to generate steam, their unlined waste pits are located along lakes and rivers. Some of the pits were inundated during past storms, including during Floyd and Hurricane Matthew in 2016. After a 2014 spill at a Duke plant coated 70 miles of the Dan River in toxic gray sludge, state regulators forced the Charlotte-based company to begin phasing out its coal ash pits by 2029. Because that work was already underway, wastewater levels inside the ash ponds have been falling, Duke Energy spokesman Bill Norton said Tuesday.

more...

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a23099217/hurricane-florence-pig-manure-coal-ash/