BY KEMP BURDETTE, CAPE FEAR RIVERKEEPER
On Thursday, September 1, 2016, it became clear that tropical storm Hermine would pass over eastern North Carolina. A flood watch was issued for several NC counties including Duplin County, the heart of “swine country” in the Cape Fear River Basin. Industrial meat production facilities cover the landscape in Duplin County. The enormous amounts of animal waste produced in these facilities poses significant risk to water quality, including drinking water supplies. We know this to be true because of the environmental disasters that occurred in the 1990s when tropical systems and heavy rains flooded swine “lagoons” or filled them so full that the berms failed and the waste poured into waterways.
Because of the disasters in the 1990s, the Swine Waste Management System General Permit (G.S. 143-215) stipulates that “Land application of waste shall cease within four hours of the time that the National Weather Service issues a Hurricane Warning, Tropical Storm Warning, or a Flood Watch associated with a tropical system including a hurricane, tropical storm, or tropical depression for the county in which the permitted facility is located.”
The rules are clear – no spraying raw feces and urine onto fields before an imminent storm. What Riverkeepers across eastern North Carolina know to be true is that Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations’ (CAFOs) operators routinely ignore these laws. As I boarded a small, single engine plane at the Duplin County Airport after the four hour cutoff for spraying, I knew I was likely to see CAFOs violating the law and spraying waste onto fields, even with a storm on the horizon that was predicted to dump five to seven inches of rain on eastern North Carolina.
Easily a third of the CAFOs I flew over had their sprayers on. Several were spraying onto saturated fields and a few were spraying into woods or ditches. I photographed each one and recorded GPS coordinates. I took the photographs to the Wilmington Regional Office of the NC Department of Environmental Quality (NC DEQ). I showed them to regulators who are responsible for overseeing CAFO operations. I explained what I had observed and showed them the photographs.
Their response was disheartening. They said they couldn’t issue notices of violation based on our photos, even though each was stamped with GPS coordinates, date and time. I urged them to get into a plane and see for themselves but was told there was no budget for those flights. That funding was cut by the NC General Assembly as part of widespread budget cuts since 2008. I asked, “What they could do?” They replied that they would go out and review the CAFO spray logs for the farms I identified. The CAFO operators self-report those logs; and they would have to literally write in the log that they were breaking the law in order for NC DEQ regulators to catch them doing anything illegal. I pointed out that the likelihood of false reporting was extremely high.
The situation is grim for water quality in the Cape Fear basin and across North Carolina unless we change the way waste management rules for CAFOs are enforced. The regulators have been defunded to the point that they can’t do commonsense inspections of CAFOs. The farmers are self-reporting; and they know well that inspections are infrequent and almost always preceded with a “heads up” call to give CAFO operators time to prepare for the visit. The NC General Assembly passed laws that make the results of those visits confidential. The burden of reporting illegal activities by CAFO operators has fallen on citizens and environmental groups like North Carolina Riverkeepers. Even when illegal activity is reported with abundant evidence, regulators are unable or unwilling to use that evidence to issue notices of violation. In short, the system is designed to fail. That’s just how the CAFO industry—and the legislators to whom they contribute millions— like it.