Flooded rivers from Florence’s drenching rains have swamped coal ash dumps and low-lying hog farms, raising pollution concerns as the swollen waterways approached their crests Monday.
North Carolina environmental regulators say several open-air manure pits at hog farms have failed, spilling pollution. State officials also were monitoring the ongoing threat from the breach of a Duke Energy coal ash landfill near Wilmington.
Department of Environmental Quality Secretary Michael Regan said Monday that the earthen dam at one hog lagoon in Duplin County had been breached. There were also seven reports of lagoon levels going over their tops or being inundated in Jones and Pender counties.
Regan said state investigators will visit the sites as conditions allow. The large pits at hog farms hold feces and urine from the animals to be sprayed on nearby fields.
In this Sunday, Sept. 16, 2018 photo. released by Cape Fear River Watch, gray water containing coal ask flows from a ruptured landfill at the L.V. Sutton Power Station in Wilmington, N.C., and flows toward Sutton Lake, near the Cape Fear River. Duke Energy says it’s initial estimate is that about 2,000 cubic yards (1,530 cubic meters) of ash were displaced at the landfill, enough to fill about 180 dump trucks. The photo was taken by Kemp Burdette with the Cape Fear River Watch, an environmental advocacy group. (Kemp Burdette/Cape Fear River Watch via AP)The Associated Press published photos of a hog farm outside Trenton on Sunday with long metal buildings ringed by dark water. Satellite photos of the same farm taken before the storm show the location of a hog waste pit completely submerged under floodwaters in the AP photos.