Swollen rivers bring threat of pollution
As rain from Florence continued to lash the Carolinas, the region’s swollen rivers were beginning to swamp coal ash dumps and low-lying hog farms Sunday, raising concerns about water pollution.
Duke Energy said the collapse of a coal ash landfill at the L.V. Sutton Power Station near Wilmington, N.C., is an “ongoing situation,” with an unknown amount of potentially contaminated storm water flowing into a nearby lake.
At a different power plant near Goldsboro, three old coal ash dumps capped with a layer of soil were inundated by the Neuse River.
An Associated Press photographer who flew over eastern North Carolina on Sunday saw several flooded hog farms along the Trent River. It wasn’t immediately clear if any animals remained inside the long metal buildings ringed by dark water.
Such farms typically have large pits filled with hog urine and feces that can cause significant water contamination if breached or overtopped by floodwaters. State environmental regulators said Sunday they had not yet received any reports of spills.
An AP analysis of location data from hog waste disposal permits shows there are at least 45 active North Carolina farms located in 100-year and 500-year flood plains at risk of being inundated by nearby streams and rivers.
Federal forecasters predicted rivers across the region would crest at record or near-record levels by today, with high water potentially remaining well into the week. Officials with the N.C. Park Council, an industry trade group, said farmers had prepared for the storm by lower water levels in their waste ponds and moving animals from flood-prone farms to higher ground.
At the Sutton plant, Duke spokeswoman Paige Sheehan said Sunday that a full assessment of how much ash escaped from the water-slogged landfill can’t occur until the rain stops. She said there was no indication that contamination from Sutton Lake had drained into the nearby Cape Fear River.
“We think the majority of the ash is settling out before it gets to the lake,” Sheehan said. We believe the chances are minimal that coal ash constituents will make it to the Cape Fear.”
The company initially estimated Saturday that about 2,000 cubic yards of ash were displaced at the landfill, enough to fill about 180 dump trucks. Sheehan said Sunday that estimate could be revised after further inspection.
The coal-fired Sutton plant was retired in 2013 and the company has been excavating millions of tons of ash from old waste pits and removing it to safer lined landfills constructed on the property. The gray ash left behind when coal is burned contains toxic heavy metals, including arsenic, lead and mercury.
State environmental regulators said they had been unable to inspect the site of the landfill collapse because of flooded roadways in and around Wilmington.
“There was a failure in the lined landfill” with material moving toward Sutton Lake, said Michael Regan, secretary of the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality. “And so it’s imperative that we get our folks on the ground to do some water testing.”
Duke’s handling of coal ash waste has been under intense scrutiny since a drainage pipe collapsed under a waste pit at an old plant in Eden in 2014, triggering a massive spill that coated 70 miles of the Dan River in gray sludge.