Waste from hog manure pits, coal ash dumps and other industrial sites could wash into homes and contaminate drinking water

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

Hurricane Florence could cause an environmental disaster in North Carolina, where waste from hog manure pits, coal ash dumps and other industrial sites could wash into homes and threaten drinking water supplies.

Preparations are also being made at half a dozen nuclear power plants that stand in the path of the 500-mile-wide hurricane, which is barreling toward the US east coast, expected to make landfall on Thursday night. More than 1.4 million residents across North and South Carolina have been ordered to evacuate.

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“Preparations to protect life and property should be rushed to completion,” the National Hurricane Center warned on Wednesday morning.

Donald Trump has declared that his administration was “absolutely, totally prepared” to deal with the storm, despite warnings from the National Weather Service that Florence “will likely be the storm of a lifetime for portions of the Carolina coast”.

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The president insisted on Wednesday that – despite widespread criticism – his government had done an “under-appreciated great job” handling Hurricane Maria last year in Puerto Rico, which killed nearly 3,000 people.

Georgia on Wednesday joined North and South Carolina and Virginia in declaring a state of emergency ahead of the storm making landfall.

In North Carolina, computer models predict more than 3ft of rain in the eastern part of the state – and fears were exacerbated by the many environmental hazards lying in the path of the storm.

There are 16 nuclear reactors in North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia, the states expected to suffer the most damage from Florence.

Duke Energy, which runs reactors at six sites, has said operators would begin shutting down nuclear plants at least two hours before hurricane-force winds arrive.

Brunswick nuclear plant, located south of Wilmington near the mouth of the Cape Fear river, was identified in 2014 by Huffpost and Weather.com as one of the nuclear facilities most at risk from rising sea levels and resulting floods.

The Brunswick plant’s two reactors are of the same design as those in Fukushima, Japan, that exploded and leaked radiation following a 2011 earthquake and tsunami. Following that disaster, federal regulators required all US nuclear plants to perform upgrades to better withstand earthquakes and flooding.

Duke Energy did not respond to requests for information about specific changes made at Brunswick, other than to say emergency generators and pumps will remove stormwater at the plant if it floods. The company issued assurances this week that it is ready for Florence, which is predicted to pack winds of up to 140mph and a 13ft storm surge.

“They were safe then. They are even safer now,” said Kathryn Green, a Duke spokeswoman, referring to the post-Fukushima improvements. “We have backups for backups for backups.”

The area in the path of the storm in eastern North Carolina is a fertile low-lying plain veined by brackish rivers with a propensity for escaping their banks. Longtime locals don’t have to strain their imaginations to foresee what rain at the level predicted from Florence can do. It’s happened before.

In September 1999, Hurricane Floyd came ashore near Cape Fear as a category 2 storm that dumped about 2ft of water on a region already soaked days earlier by Hurricane Dennis. The result was the worst natural disaster in state history, a flood that killed dozens of people and left whole towns underwater, with residents stranded on rooftops.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Murphy Family Farms employees float dead pigs down a flooded road near Beulaville, North Carolina, on 24 September 1999, following Hurricane Floyd. Photograph: Alan Marler/AP

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. Rescue workers smeared Vick’s VapoRub under their noses to try to numb their senses against the stench.

Florence is forecast to make landfall in the same region as a much stronger storm.

“This one is pretty scary,” said Jamie Kruse, director of the Center for Natural Hazards Research at East Carolina University. “The environmental impacts will be from concentrated animal feeding operations and coal ash pits. Until the system gets flushed out, there’s going to be a lot of junk in the water.”

North Carolina has roughly 2,100 industrial-scale pork farms containing more than 9 million hogs typically housed in long metal sheds with grated floors designed to allow the animals’ urine and feces to fall through and flow into nearby open-air pits containing millions of gallons of untreated sewage.

During Floyd, dozens of these lagoons either breached or were inundated by flood waters, spilling the contents. State taxpayers ended up buying out and closing 43 farms located in floodplains.

To prepare for Florence, the North Carolina Pork Council says its members have pumped down lagoon levels to absorb at least 2ft of rain. Low-lying farms have been moving their hogs to higher ground.

The Environmental Protection Agency said on Tuesday that it would be monitoring nine toxic waste cleanup sites near the Carolinas coast for potential flooding. More than a dozen such Superfund sites in and around Houston flooded last year in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, with spills of potentially hazardous materials reported at two.

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Also of concern are more than two dozen massive coal ash pits operated by Duke Energy. The gray ash that remains after coal is burned contains potentially harmful amounts of mercury, arsenic and lead.

Since power plants need vast amounts of water to generate steam, their unlined waste pits are located along lakes and rivers. Some of the pits were inundated during past storms, including during Floyd and Hurricane Matthew in 2016.

After a 2014 spill at a Duke plant that coated 70 miles of the Dan river in toxic gray sludge, state regulators forced the Charlotte-based company to begin phasing out its coal ash pits by 2029. Because that work was already under way, wastewater levels inside the ash ponds have been falling, a Duke Energy spokesman, Bill Norton, said on Tuesday.

“We’re more prepared than ever,” said Norton, adding that crews will be monitoring water levels at the pits throughout the storm.