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MASTERSON ONLINE: One toxic ‘soup’

30 Sep 2018 9:16 AM | Anonymous member

MASTERSON ONLINE: One toxic ‘soup’

By Mike Masterson

Posted: September 29, 2018 at 2:27 a.m.


If veteran North Carolina environmental writer Elizabeth Ouzts wanted to know the latest developments on the C&H Hog Farms operation in our Buffalo National River watershed, I could help bring her up to speed.


I’ve equally relied on her work to learn how the record-setting flooding from Hurricane Florence affected that state’s 2,100 similar large swine factories and 3,700 massive open-air waste lagoons.


Judging from Ouzts’ recent account in Environmental Health News, it’s been a troubled history with North Carolina’s “broken factory farm system” that has grown increasingly serious with repeated floods and storms.


In her article published Sept. 21, she wrote that Florence caused structural damage or flooded many hog waste pits, sending untold tons of toxic raw waste mixed with floodwaters into surrounding environments.


The full face of the storm’s damage remains unseen, as waste from these factories (and other pollutants such as coal ash) continued to rise at that time in what swelled into the largest East Coast deluge ever recorded north of Florida.


Previous calamities, she wrote, involved leakages and failures from those enormous lagoons of animal feces that are periodically reduced by spraying excess raw waste onto crop fields. It’s a practice that doesn’t work in hurricanes and tropical storms. (I’d add C&H’s unsuitable location here in our Buffalo watershed atop fractured karst terrain.)


In a changing climate, large rain events are becoming more frequent and severe in North Carolina, she writes, “and clean-water advocates say it’s more urgent than ever to shut down waste pits in areas most likely to flood and to phase out the antiquated systems altogether.”


Before Florence made landfall, she reports, nonprofit Waterkeeper Alliance members observed various hog operations by plane. They reportedly witnessed seven owners illegally spraying waste onto fields that would soon be inundated by heavy rain.


Her story says many state farmers with lagoons on the verge of overflowing faced a difficult choice between violating permits by spraying their contents on fields, thereby harming rivers and creeks in the longer term, or directly discharging waste from the pits.


The group also noted problems that tracked with state regulators’ running tally of pit failures based on the factories’ reports. After two days, more than 100 pits had been affected by the storm. Matt Butler, program director at Sound Rivers, a member of the Waterkeeper Alliance, told Ouzts that after Hurricane Matthew in 2016, and now with Florence, the state keeps repeating the same mistakes.


Ouzts writes that until this year the program to reform the old methods hadn’t received new funding in more than a decade, although some 60 factory hog farms are still in the 100-year floodplain. It was too early to tell at the time of her reporting just how many facilities were overflowing. Yet state officials, the pork industry, and environmental advocates agreed that investing more in the program should be a priority.


Ouzts reports that most experts say focusing only on the so-called 100-year floodplain is a mistake since heavy rains are expected to become the new normal. For instance, she says, Florence was considered a 1,000-year-storm while Matthew, just two years ago, was considered a 500-year storm.


This was even more reason advocates of water quality have long argued all hog factories should phase out the older open-air waste pit version and convert to more sustainable systems now used in other states and countries, her story says.


Such solutions are easier said than done, Ouzts wrote, since that state’s Department of Environmental Quality is understaffed and underfunded by more than 40 percent since 2012. Regulators have faced pressure to protect the state’s largest industry.


Imagine that, continually lobbied politicos more involved in appeasing financial supporters and mega-corporations than ensuring disease-free water for North Carolinians when both seem feasible.


State agricultural officials initially estimated Florence claimed at least 5,500 hogs and 3.4 million poultry, most trapped in flooded barns, Ouzts writes, adding that Waterkeepers say “the real culprits are the giant corporate conglomerates that take no responsibility for the waste their hogs produce.”


Crystal Coast Waterkeeper Larry Baldwin was quoted saying he felt bad for those who have invested their entire lives into growing hogs under the state’s system, and that it should be up to the corporate backers to determine how they might use some of their profits to find a better system. “We’re not even through hurricane season yet,” he told Ouzts.


Ouzts said all new factory-scale farms with spray waste ponds (as with C&H here) have been banned in North Carolina for more than two decades, as factories slowly adapt to more sustainable methods. But the older, grandfathered factories continue to be re-permitted.


With nine million hogs, North Carolina is a top national pork producer. The industry—primarily multinational corporations that contract with local farmers—is concentrated in North Carolina’s low-lying southeastern coastal plain, which is precisely where Florence crushed rainfall records.


Odor and pathogens wafting from animal barns, waste pits, and spray fields can affect and sicken neighbors even in the best weather. That led three juries this year to award hundreds of millions in damages to plaintiffs in suits against Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest pork producer, with more lawsuits reportedly in the pipeline.


A recent Duke University study only reinforced such concerns, Ouzts writes, “citing low life expectancy in communities near confined animal feeding operations, even after adjusting for socioeconomic factors known to affect health and lifespan.”


Such threats are amplified after heavy rains, Ouzts writes. “Fields saturated with rainwater can’t absorb nutrients from waste pits; excess nitrogen and [phosphorus] instead appear in rivers and streams, at worst causing algae blooms and fish kills.

Manure pits can burst or overflow, sending sludge, microbes, and potentially antibiotic-resistant bacteria into floodwaters, heightening their risk to public health.”


Ryke Longest, director of Duke University’s environmental law clinic, told Ouzts, “You’re releasing all of that and making this soup of eastern North Carolina.”

Mike Masterson is a longtime Arkansas journalist. Email him at mmasterson@arkansasonline.com.

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