As the new home of NCPIRG's environmental work,
Environment North Carolina can be contacted with any questions regarding this
news release.
As Hurricane Isabel hammers
North Carolina over the next few days, it will bring a torrent of heavy rains
and, quite possibly, hog waste.
In Eastern North Carolina, more than 4,000 factory-style hog farming operations
make their home. On this coastal plain, confined-animal feeding operations store
manure from as many as 10,000 pigs in giant, lined pits, in some cases as long
and as wide as two football fields. Periodically, waste from the pits, called
lagoons, is sprayed onto nearby crop fields, or sprayfields, as fertilizer.
But the lagoon-and-sprayfield system does not withstand hurricanes. In 1999
in the aftermath of Hurricane Floyd, the state’s last major rainstorm to travel
inland, more than 400 waste pits overflowed, sending millions of gallons of
waste into floodwaters.
Clean water advocates say that hurricanes like Isabel bring to light what is
a problem day in and day out with factory farming operations: the lagoon-and-sprayfield
system itself.
Indeed, even slightly-above average rainfall can cause problems. Last spring,
hundreds of operations were cited for violating waste-storage standards: during
the steady spring rains, they had allowed their waste pits to become dangerously
full, with too little room left between the top of the waste and the top of
the lagoon.
The more water, the less capacity crop fields and nearby streams have for nutrient-rich
hog waste. When fields are saturated, they don’t absorb the nutrients, which
go straight to waterways. Here, they can cause nitrification in streams, which
ultimately chokes aquatic life and causes fish kills.
The coming days will show what excess pollution resulted from Hurricane Isabel.
Whatever the results, it’s clear that in lowland Eastern North Carolina, where
rains are frequent, factory hog farms, led by multi-national conglomerates like
Smithfield Foods, should move to modern waste-management technology for their
factory style farms.
