Hurricane Florence Brought North Carolina an Environmental Disaster
Just as everybody and his uncle Barney Fife warned, Hurricane Florence resulted in untold environmental damage in the newly insane state of North Carolina, and in entirely predictable ways, too. For example, the pig lagoons were breached. From The Washington Post:
We saw cesspools where the usual pink had turned a telltale brown, which meant that they’d been submerged in rising floodwaters. (The pork industry prefers “overtopped,” as if we’re dealing with whipped cream spilling over a dessert.) Others suffered massive structural damage to their walls. On Thursday morning, I saw a blowout in a lagoon wall so huge you could drive a truck through it. The untreated feces and urine, full of pathogens and chemicals, had already flowed downstream, leaving only some sludge at the bottom. I also saw how the industrial chicken production facilities had flooded. Water had gone over the chicken barns, washing the waste from their floors down our streams. I didn’t see the corpses of animals, though I knew they were inside. In the past, the facilities used to open the doors during storms to let the animals out, but the images we collected were so horrific that the practice ended.
The Waterkeepers Alliance does an heroic job of bearing witness to catastrophes like this one, as well as being a primary-source archive for similar catastrophes of the past. To wit:
The pork industry claims that this slurry is basically harmless, to which I say: Well, get your bathing suit, and go for a swim. It’s highly toxic stuff. Sampling by the U.S. Geological Survey conducted after Hurricane Floyd in 1999 found dangerous levels of E. coli and Clostridium perfringens in water, even after floodwaters had receded. Hogs and humans are similar enough that their waste needs to be handled with equal care. The pathogens, viruses and bacteria that swine carry can include antibiotic-resistant strains that directly affect people. Researchers have found that North Carolina industrial livestock workers carry strains of Staphylococcus aureus associated with swine, including antibiotic-resistant strains.
Meanwhile, the coal-ash dams got fairly well beaten up, too, although Duke Energy is busily telling folks to stay calm because all is well. Duke Energy doesn't have much credibility left on this topic, though, having tried to squirm away from a serious coal-ash spill in 2014. So the company's reassurances have been treated skeptically on the ground. From PBS:
No environmental regulators were at the scene to help catalog the potential harm to the Cape Fear, with officials citing unsafe conditions. Mike Regan, secretary of the state Department of Environmental Quality, said Saturday that aerial video and photos of the site show “potential coal ash” flowing into the river. “When the environment is conducive, we will put people on the ground to verify the amount of potential coal ash that could have left and entered those flood waters,” Regan said. Floodwaters breached several points early Friday in the earthen dam at Sutton Lake, the plant’s 1,100-acre (445-hectare) reservoir. Lake water then flooded one of three large coal ash dumps lining the lakeshore.
The one problem with these deregulated business-friendly environments about which so many conservative governors and legislators boast is that they only work until something complete unforeseen happens, and since part of the business-friendly environments is cutbacks in environmental monitoring, more things are unforeseen than they used to be. There was a great moment in Friday night's debate in Texas between Beto O'Rourke and Tailgunner Ted Cruz in which the latter boasted:
"A thousand people a day come to Texas. We understand that lower taxes and less regulations mean jobs."
And, by the timeline of the transcript, three-and-a-half minutes later, when challenged by O'Rourke on his diligence as a senator while running fairly constantly for president, Cruz said:
"Congressman O'Rourke does not seem to understand that representing Texas is not doing a photo op in every county in Texas with reporters in tow. It's actually standing up and fighting for the people of Texas. In the years I have represented Texas, I have been on the ground. I was in West, when the explosion happened. I was with the families of the first responders who were killed."
The explosion in West, Texas in 2013 was directly caused by a lack of rigorous oversight and a lax state regulatory regime. (OSHA hadn't inspected the plant in almost 30 years.) That's not my opinion. That was the opinion of the U.S. Chemical Safety Board after its investigation. And this was what then-Governor Rick Perry, now the Secretary of Energy, told the Associated Press in the immediate aftermath of the disaster:
"Through their elected officials [people] clearly send the message of their comfort with the amount of oversight."
The Republican idea of governance needs to be seriously overhauled or abandoned. The president* is not the problem there.
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