A handful of livestock farms reported high water levels in their manure lagoons, but no breaches or overflows, after Hurricane Dorian left North Carolina with limited damage compared to Hurricane Florence a year ago. Gov. Roy Cooper summarized the views of local officials, residents and business owners, in saying over the weekend, “This could have been much worse for our state.”
On Sunday, the state Department of Environmental Quality listed eight reports of “high freeboard” on livestock lagoons following rainfall from the hurricane. “High freeboard” means the water is near the top of lagoon walls. A farm in Columbus County in the southeastern corner of the state, said on Sunday that water was within a foot-and-a-half of the top of two lagoons. By comparison, Hurricane Florence caused structural damage to six lagoons and more than 40 lagoons were flooded or overflowed.
The North Carolina Pork Council, a farm group, said of Friday that hog farms “did not have significant impacts from severe Hurricane Dorian … Forecasts for potential flooding do not indicate that farms will be affected in coming days.”
Hurricane Florence caused $2.4 billion in agricultural losses, dominated by damage to crops such as tobacco, soybeans, sweet potatoes, corn and cotton. North Carolina ranks second in the nation in hog production and third in poultry. There are roughly 3,700 open-topped manure lagoons in the state. Environmentalists have argued for years that the lagoons, located mostly in the eastern half of the state and holding millions of gallons of raw manure, are vulnerable to flooding when severe storms strike.
Farmers were harvesting corn, sweet potatoes and tobacco ahead of Dorian’s arrival, said a North Carolina Farm Bureau video report. “Initial reports are that damage was not as bad as feared,” said the report on Friday.-
Hurricane Floyd, in 1999, is the benchmark for hurricane damage to livestock farms in North Carolina. The storm killed 21,000 hogs and flooded 55 lagoons. To prevent that scale of damage again, the state spent $28 million over the years to close 103 hog lagoons located on the floodplain. Hurricane Florence killed 3.5 million poultry and 5,500 hogs.
For more on pollution problems in the North Carolina hog industry, check out FERN’s recent investigation.