(Photo Credit: North Carolina Pork Council on Facebook)Hog farmers in North Carolina have been readying their facilities, including lagoons, to accommodate extra rainfall as Hurricane Florence heads to the region. They’re trying to avoid what happened in September 1999, when Hurricane Floyd flooded area farms and wrought environmental havoc.
The state has around 2,100 industrial-scale pork farms, the Associated Press reports. Ahead of Florence, the North Carolina Pork Council says that farmers have taken precautions to protect animals, manage lagoons, and prepare for power outages from the storm, which is predicted to bring more than 15 inches of rain and high winds.
Specifically, those preparations include shifting animals to higher ground in known flood-prone areas, ensuring ample feed supplies are in place, securing generators and fuel supplies to respond to extended power outages, and assessing lagoon levels.
“Every hog farm lagoon is required to maintain a minimum buffer to account for major flood events,” the council noted. “Farmers across the major production areas of North Carolina are reporting current lagoon storage levels that can accommodate more than 25 inches of rain, with many reporting capacity volumes far beyond that.”
Smithfield Foods has around 250 company-owned farms and 1,500 contract farms in Virginia and North Carolina. The company released a statement on Tuesday saying that employees are taking steps to protect people, animals, and buildings from the hurricane. That includes lowering lagoon levels in accordance with state regulations and farms’ nutrient management plans.
Marlowe Vaughan of Ivey’s Spring Creek Farm in Goldsboro, North Carolina, told NPR’s Dan Charles earlier this week that workers had pumped liquid waste out of the farm’s lagoons and sprayed it as fertilizer on nearby fields to make room for incoming rainfall. North Carolina State University experts told Charles that lagoons should be able to handle almost three feet of rain — with adequate precautions.
The concern is that the storm causes lagoons to release animal waste into waterways, which is what happened in 1999. Already weakened by Hurricane Dennis, North Carolina got hammered by Hurricane Floyd. It became the state’s worst environmental disaster, the AP’s Michael Biesecker reported.
“The bloated carcasses of hundreds of thousands of hogs, chickens and other drowned livestock bobbed in a nose-stinging soup of fecal matter, pesticides, fertilizer, and gasoline so toxic that fish flopped helplessly on the surface to escape it,” he wrote.
Coal ash pits are also vulnerable to the approaching hurricane. A Duke Energy spokesperson told the AP that crews will be monitoring water levels at the pits during the storm. “We’re more prepared than ever,” he said.
Nine hazardous waste sites in the Carolinas are in Florence’s projected path, the Huffington Post reported. An agency spokesperson said that staff in EPA Regions 3 and 4 “are conducting the necessary response planning to support any requests from response partners that are related to potential discharge and/or releases of oil or hazardous materials.”
