Hog Tide - hurricanes brought vast environmental damage from North Carolina's pork industry - Brief Article

Sierra, Jan, 2000 by Fetzer Mills

What can we learn from Hurricane Floyd?

Hurricanes may be acts of God, but when back-to-back hurricanes Dennis and Floyd pounded North Carolina last fall, the catastrophic flooding and pollution that followed were created by the hand of man.

Before the deluge, North Carolina was home to 9 million hogs, housed mostly in huge animal-feeding operations, especially in the eastern part of the state. These densely packed animals produce an enormous amount of excrement, which is either channeled into open-air "lagoons" or sprayed on fields. When Floyd struck, hundreds of these noxious ponds throughout eastern North Carolina flooded or breached, pouring millions of gallons of untreated wastes into the floodwaters. In Duplin County, pools of rank, fetid water topped with rainbow slicks stood everywhere, and roadside ditches were filled with the vile brew. A hideous stench hung over the county--a combination of raw sewage, animal waste, petrochemicals, pesticides, and rotting carcasses.

The flood drowned untold numbers of hogs. Estimates vary wildly, from the state Agriculture Department's low of 28,000 to the half-million-plus by the Natural Resources Conservation Service (a branch of the U.S. Department of Agriculture). The real number may never be known; when incinerators brought in to burn the carcasses failed, many of the hogs were buried in mass graves on the farms.

The pork industry is blaming the devastation on a "500-year flood," but the amount of rainfall was not that extraordinary. "It may have been a 500-year flood, but it was more like a 50-year rainfall," says Dan Whittle, a senior attorney with the Environmental Defense Fund. What exacerbated the damage was years of draining, filling, and ditching wetlands, and then covering the floodplains with not only mammoth hog and poultry farms but junkyards and sewage-treatment plants. Ominously, the Atlantic is entering a cyclone cycle much like the one that produced the killer hurricanes of the 1950s. According to Stanley Riggs, a geologist at East Carolina University, if the state's approach to development in the floodplains and wetlands doesn't change, the next "500-year flood" is likely to come soon.

Meanwhile, Edyth Brown of the tiny agricultural community of Chinquapin worries about her water. "I'm afraid it will never be safe to drink again," she says. Leon Chesnin, professor emeritus of waste management at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, says that waste from a spilled hog lagoon can contaminate groundwater for 40 years.

As North Carolina struggles with the human and ecological misery of Floyd's wake, many are determined to see that such a disaster never happens again. According to Molly Diggins, the Sierra Club's North Carolina Chapter director, "The profitability of the hog industry in North Carolina has been based primarily on two things: dirt cheap land--that is, floodplains--and a dirt cheap disposal system--lagoons." Waste lagoons shouldn't be allowed in the floodplain, she says, and hog operations that are relocated have to find a nonpolluting way to manage their waste. A number of alternative systems are now becoming available, says Diggins, including "one foolproof solution--fewer hogs."

Part of the Club's agenda is being put forward by North Carolina's Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), now under the direction of Bill Holman, a former Club lobbyist. The agency is not allowing hog facilities that were more than half destroyed to rebuild in the floodplain, and those that do must demonstrate that they can deal with their waste in a nonpolluting way.

But remaining hog operations are going into the rainy season with brimming excrement lagoons, and the DENR is allowing them to spray hog waste on already saturated fields an some forested areas. The department says it won't allow this to further contaminate the state's water, but it lack the staff to back up that promise. The state's hog-friendly legislature, say Diggins, "has historically been unwilling to adequately fund enforcement environmental laws." Even when it drowning in pig waste.