Why the heck are there pig farms in the path of hurricanes?

Posted by Jeff on Oct 25, 2016 @ 7:06 am in Conservation | 0 comments | Last modified: October 24, 2016

Some 2 million chickens and at least 4,800 pigs drowned after Hurricane Matthew hit North Carolina earlier this month. The storm inundated massive pools of hog feces and piles of chicken manure, spreading pollution from North Carolina’s thriving pork and poultry industry into the surrounding woods, rivers, and swamps.

“I’m seeing a lot of devastation out there,” said Rick Dove, senior advisor to the environmental group Waterkeeper Alliance, after flying over North Carolina’s coastal plain last week to survey the hurricane’s destruction, which killed at least 26 people in the state and caused $1.5 billion in damages.

For a state that’s regularly flooded by hurricanes, it might seem strange that it’s also flooded by hogs. The industry surged in the early ’90s, in response to government incentives and lax regulation, and by 1996 North Carolina had become the second-biggest pig state in the nation, after Iowa.

And these weren’t your old-fashioned swine farms — hundreds of pigs were confined in close quarters inside long, low aluminum houses. Farmers washed thousands of gallons of pig feces into earthen pits, called “lagoons.” They were clustered in the inexpensive and swampy lowlands, where the neighbors were disproportionately poor minorities.

Then came the hurricanes: In 1996, Fran killed 24 people and caused $2.3 billion in damages, followed in 1999 by Floyd, which killed 52 and cost $6 billion. When the floodwaters from both storms hit the new hog facilities, all hell broke loose.

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