Coming: Hell and High Water

As another “unprecedented” storm visits the U.S., flooding threatens some 41 million Americans vulnerable to serious inundation and the toxicity that comes with it. And our traditional approaches to flood risks aren’t keeping us above water.

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As Hurricane Florence bore down on the Carolinas this past September, projections that it would make landfall as a Category 4 storm were gradually scaled back. But scientists, weather forecasters, and public officials across the country scrambled to echo the same warning: the water is still on its way.A storm surge as high as thirteen feet. Up to forty inches of rain. The slow-moving behemoth of the storm reminded some forecasters of Hurricane Harvey which, just one year ago, lingered over the Houston area for days, dumping some sixty inches of rain. Also like Harvey, sitting directly in Florence’s path were industrial facilities producing prodigious amounts of waste. These recent disasters reveal how the U.S. is struggling to adapt to heavier rains and more frequent major storms.

While Harvey took aim at oil, gas, and chemical facilities along the Louisiana and Texas coastlines, in Florence’s path sat North Carolina’s sprawling hog and poultry industries, and coal-fired power plants—all of which store large amounts of waste in open-air, ground-level pits often referred to as “lagoons.”

The waste lagoons created by North Carolina’s nearly nine million hogs contain a toxic mix of fecal matter, urine, and industrial-grade chemicals, including ammonia, phosphorus, nitrates, and other heavy metals. (The scene is similar at facilities housing the state’s more than 800 million chickens.) Even when flooding is not a threat, communities near these facilities report concerns ranging from groundwater contamination to asthma to odors so overwhelming that neighbors are forced to stay inside.

Like Harvey, sitting directly in Florence’s path were industrial facilities producing prodigious amounts of waste.

In 1999, Hurricane Floyd slammed into the state’s eastern shore, bringing storm surge up to fifteen feet, with rainfall up to twenty-four inches, and leaving behind rivers flooded with hog waste and dead pigs. In anticipation of the storm and its aftermath, some facilities also sprayed waste over surrounding fields to lower levels in the lagoons—spray which quickly became toxic runoff when the rain fell. Massive fish kills were documented downstream of sprayed fields and breached lagoons.

Two years before Floyd, North Carolina’s state legislature had passed a moratorium on the construction or expansion of hog waste lagoons. But like many environmental regulations, the state’s moratorium “grandfathered in” existing farm operations, leaving at least 150 factory farms with waste lagoons sitting in the middle of a floodplain. Statewide, roughly 4,000 lagoons constructed before 1997 are still active today.

In 2016, Hurricane Matthew reaffirmed fears that another Floyd was inevitable, as hundreds of hog and poultry farms were inundated by floodwaters, contaminating drinking water and carrying waste toward the ocean.

After Florence, according to North Carolina state officials, at least thirty-two hog waste lagoons released waste (“overtopping”), and an additional seventeen have reached capacity, making overtopping “likely.” Thirty-nine additional lagoons are so flooded that even one to three inches of rainfall would be enough to send waste spilling out into nearby waterways.

An eerily similar story is unfolding at North Carolina’s coal-fired power plants, both active and retired, where open-air lagoons house the toxic byproduct of burning coal known as coal ash.

For decades, coal ash disposal was simply not regulated in most states; companies would chuck the ash into empty mines, or syphon it into unlined “ponds.” Communities across North Carolina protested that their ground and well water were being contaminated, often to the point of being undrinkable, by coal ash sludge stored in massive lagoons.

Duke Energy, a key operator of coal-fired power plants in the state, maintains that their coal ash disposal sites pose no risk to local groundwater. Yet test wells at major utilities across the country have confirmed groundwater contamination near coal ash lagoons across the country, including in North Carolina.

In early 2018, the Trump Administration announced that it would be rolling back an Obama-era EPA rule, the first federal-level regulation governing the disposal of coal ash, which required groundwater monitoring around coal ash lagoons and landfills, and placed restrictions on where new lagoons could be constructed given potential environmental risks.

In the wake of Florence, local news organizations and environmental groups closely monitored coal ash sites at high risk for flooding. Near Wilmington, floodwaters reportedly breached a Duke-owned coal facility, posing an imminent threat to the nearby Cape Fear River. Duke officials insist no coal ash escaped, but local environmental groups have criticized those reports. Initial tests by the state's Department of Environmental Quality show levels of toxic heavy metals commonly found in coal ash that are currently within state standards; environmental watchdog groups argue that it’s impossible to assess contamination levels before testing sediment from the river bottom.

Meanwhile in South Carolina, state environmental officials and Santee Cooper, the state-owned electric and water utility, raced to construct an inflatable dam to keep coal ash from spilling into the Waccamaw River as a nearby lagoon flooded. While floodwaters came within inches of breaching the dam, state authorities now believe the threat to the river—and those who live along it—has passed.

Just hours after regulators reported that the immediate coal ash threat to the Waccamaw River had been averted, however, a nearby wastewater treatment facility was knocked offline by flooding. In less than 24 hours, the damaged facility released several million gallons of untreated human sewage into the Waccamaw.

Now, weeks after Florence first made landfall, floodwaters have yet to recede. Even an unremarkable rainstorm could push still-swollen rivers and streams to spill back over their banks.

And while North Carolina recovers from what will likely be the most severe, widespread flooding event experienced in the U.S. in 2018, Florence marked the end of what was already an extreme summer for rainfall and flooding across the Midwest and eastern United States. Cities along the east coast, from Washington, D.C. to Concord, New Hampshire, experienced their wettest summers on record. In late August, southwest Wisconsin saw more rainfall in two weeks than the region would typically record over six months.

This past spring, a report in the journal Environmental Research Letters found that the number of people in the U.S. exposed to serious flooding is roughly 41 million—about three times greater than FEMA’s current estimates.The report’s authors note that population trends and climate change will likely continue to lead to “significant future increases in exposure.” A recent report from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that global warming trends threaten thirty to eighty million people with sea level rise related flooding by the year 2100, depending on the severity of the temperature rise. This also includes broad swaths of U.S. industry and agriculture, also located along rivers and major streams that provide irrigation, transportation, and cooling.

The growing risk of flooding may be outweighing the benefits of that proximity to water.

These risks aren’t unique to North Carolina or to hog farms, coal-fired power plants, or wastewater treatment facilities. Coastal oil and gas facilities are sitting ducks. As mentioned, Hurricane Harvey’s flooding threatened a whole string of such operations along the Texas and Louisiana coastlines. Chemical plants dot the exposed Gulf coast and the low-lying floodplains of a number of major U.S. rivers. A 2018 New York Times analysis estimates that 2,500 sites handling toxic chemicals are located in flood-prone areas—1,400 lie in zones FEMA has designated as high-risk.

A recent Associated Press study found that 327 Superfund sites—areas designated by the EPA as highly toxic—are increasingly vulnerable to the flooding and sea-level rise that will accompany a changing climate. The report noted that nearly 2 million people live within a mile of these 327 flood-prone sites. Just like hog and poultry farms, coal ash disposal sites, oil and gas facilities, and other major animal agriculture operations, communities in these high-risk areas are overwhelmingly low-income and minority-majority—with few resources to combat the growing threat.

And while flooding is the most common natural disaster in the United States, our traditional approaches to flood risk management are ill-suited for heavier rainfall and more frequent major storms. Some of the most common flood risk management strategies, like levees, are actually designed to allow people and industries to remain in at-risk areas. An in-depth report from ProPublica and Reveal, published this August, noted that current cost-benefit calculations employed by government agencies charged with flood control—namely the Army Corps of Engineers—often favor “highly valued property over less affluent communities” by holding up the value of the land to be protected against the costs of potential preventative measures, such as dams.

In the two decades between Hurricane Floyd and Hurricane Florence, too little has changed—except the climate.

Taxpayers are often being asked to foot the bill for responding to flooding. In a review of a "cycle" of public spending in response to disasters, the New York Times reports that FEMA’s public assistance program has provided at least $81 billion to state and local governments since 1992, providing money to rebuild in ever-expanding flood zones "in defiance of climate change," and leaving people vulnerable to the next storm. In North Carolina, Duke Energy lobbied the state legislature to increase rates for its customers to cover the costs of shutting down aging coal ash sites. Texas policymakers fast-tracked nearly $4 billion to construct barriers protecting oil and gas facilities from the type of flooding that shut down refineries in the wake of Hurricane Harvey. The petrochemical industry in that state is now lobbying for an additional $12 billion in taxpayer funding for a “coastal spine,” to protect some of the country’s most profitable oil and gas facilities, as well as communities, from future flooding. Meanwhile, chemical companies continue to invest in new construction along the Gulf Coast.

In 2015, the same year the Obama Administration passed the federal rules governing coal ash disposal that Trump has since repealed, President Obama also signed an executive order mandating that all federal infrastructure projects take into account increased flooding risks due to climate change. In August 2017, the Trump Administration repealed it.

In the two decades between Hurricane Floyd and Hurricane Florence, too little has changed—except the climate. As historic rainfall totals become the norm, and storms like Florence and Harvey become more common, there’s an urgent need to protect people, especially those living near industries producing toxic waste. We need to commit to more robust infrastructure, to regulating heavily polluting industries, and to prepare our communities for the rising waters to come. It is unlikely that North Carolina—or the rest of the country—can afford to wait another two decades before changing course.