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Nitrate News -- October, 1999

Runoff from Floyd creating dead zone in Pamlico Sound Copyright © 1999 Nando Media Copyright © 1999 Associated Press By ESTES THOMPSON RALEIGH (October 8, 1999 8:09 p.m. EDT http://www.nandotimes.com) - Marine scientists said Friday that Hurricane Floyd's muddy, sewage-polluted floodwaters have created a spreading "dead zone" for aquatic life in Pamlico Sound, the nation's second-largest estuary. "What we're seeing is an ecological event on the catastrophic scale," said Hans Paerl, a marine scientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The brown water containing human and animal waste and chemicals is flowing from the Neuse and Tar rivers into Pamlico Sound and from the Cape Fear River near Wilmington straight to the Atlantic. The muddy Roanoke River also is emptying pollutants into Albemarle Sound, but the effects there aren't as well-known. Floyd dumped 20 inches of rain on eastern North Carolina on Sept. 16, flooding hog lagoons and sewer plants, homes and motor vehicles, while claiming at least 48 lives. The sludge of human, animal and chemical waste and fuel products has slowly made its way to North Carolina's coastal estuaries, where it is beginning to squeeze the oxygen out of the water. That makes it impossible for fish and other aquatic life to survive. The largest affected area is a 350-square-mile area of Pamlico Sound and part of adjacent Core Sound. The runoff, which is fresh water, sits atop the salt water, robbing it of oxygen from surface air and reducing salinity to one-half to one-third of normal. Both ingredients are essential to aquatic life. Paerl said he found drastically low oxygen levels in the bottom water of Pamlico Sound - 1 milligram per liter, compared to the normal 7 milligrams. In that area, the chocolate-colored runoff contrasted sharply with the blue-green saltwater. "Less than 1 milligram would not be habitable for finfish and crabs and most shellfish," Paerl said. Yet fishermen in areas not affected by the dirty water are catching fish and shrimp, Nancy Fish of the state Division of Marine Fisheries said Friday. "Things are moving ahead of the plume of fresh water that doesn't have much oxygen in it," she said. Initial testing showed fish, crabs and shrimp - where they were found - were safe to eat and found no unsafe toxin levels that state officials feared would come with the hurricane's runoff. The samples were taken at 10 sites in the Neuse, Cape Fear, New and Pamlico rivers and Albemarle and Pamlico sounds. Paerl and other scientists said it may be next spring or summer before the runoff's long-term effect on the sound and ocean is known. In 1993, massive flooding doubled the size of a Gulf of Mexico "dead zone" that some scientists believe is caused by fertilizer runoffs in the Mississippi River basin. The situation in the Pamlico, an estuary second in size only to Chesapeake Bay, is causing concern because pollutants won't readily flush into the ocean, said Paerl. The Pamlico has just three inlets through the Outer Banks to the Atlantic; most of the sound's water leaves via evaporation, he said. "The sound is acting like a giant bathtub," he said, adding that the nitrogen-based nutrients become more concentrated as water evaporates. Off the Cape Fear coast past Wilmington, the runoff is at least 40 feet deep and covers 300 square miles, said Larry Cahoon, marine scientist at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. Cahoon said the Cape Fear never experienced plummeting oxygen levels because its water flow is rapid, but the brown color indicates a large amount of nutrients that eventually could feed algae blooms that use up oxygen and kill fish. "There's a brown ocean right now," Cahoon said. "The big question is how long will it take for the system to recover," Paerl said. "This is the biggest single pulse of nutrient input this system has seen, as least during my 21 years as a researcher. It is really a huge experiment in progress."

North Carolina Rethinks Law After Floyd Shows Its Flaws (NY Times, October 17, 1999 By PETER T. KILBORN) KENANSVILLE, N.C. -- In the aftermath of Hurricane Floyd, loose regulations that helped eastern North Carolina become the nation's biggest producer of turkeys and the second biggest of hogs have come back to haunt the state's public health and its environment. Officials say that the September storm that hit the region harder than anywhere else, killing 48 people and leaving behind more than $1 billion in largely inescapable damage, also left a vast amount of damage that might have been averted: incalculable and continuing hazards in ground water, wells and rivers from animal waste, mostly from giant hog farms. For years, farmers had been free to build hog and poultry operations as big as they wanted and wherever they liked. They were allowed to dig huge pits for animal waste, without regard to the water table or the health and sensibilities of neighbors. In the hurricane, feces and urine soaked the terrain and flowed into rivers from the overburdened waste pits the industry calls lagoons. The storm killed more than two million turkeys, chickens and livestock in the region, and waste from the farms is expected to keep leaching into the water supply until next spring. "We do have a practical problem here," Gov. James B. Hunt Jr. said. Normally by mid-October, Mr. Hunt said, farmers would have reduced the levels of waste in the lagoons, where it evolves naturally into nutrients that are sprayed on crops. But the lagoons are brimming with flood-bloated waste, and there is less use for it now. The growth of crops slows in the fall, and many fields have been saturated or rendered fallow by the storm. [On Thursday the State Department of Environment and Natural Resources announced an "emergency waste management strategy" for hog and poultry farms in an effort to keep waste out of the water supply. The agency is allowing farmers to spread waste to more fields but it prohibited reconstruction of severely hurricane-damaged waste lagoons in the flood plain. [In the current soaked condition of the land, some waste sprayed on the fields will spread. "We recognize this policy could contribute to water quality problems through the winter," said Bill Holman, the state's assistant secretary for environmental protection. "There are so many swine operations we have a long way to go."] In Duplin County, of which Kenansville is the seat, and across the rest of North Carolina east of Interstate 95, Hurricane Floyd has exposed the hazards of one of farming's great innovations of the 1980's and 1990's and the political liaisons that helped it develop. That is the practice of industrial farming, or raising livestock and poultry in close and confined quarters. It allows farmers to raise thousands of hogs on land where they could once raise only scores and gives them tight and automated control over their livestocks' diets, health and growth. The farmers raise pigs under contract to major hog processors, known in the business as "integrators," like Murphy Family Farms of Duplin County. The processor supervises the construction of barns, supplies the pigs and their feed and medicine and hauls them off to slaughter after the four or five months it takes for them to grow to 250 pounds. For eastern North Carolina, this assembly-line production of hogs and turkeys has come as a savior for tobacco farmers whose incomes plunged with the decline in smoking. But Hurricane Floyd has stirred controversy over a means of capturing the wastes of a hog, which produces four times that of a human. Human waste in North Carolina and most of the nation must be captured in public sewers and private septic systems to prevent the spread of disease. But the state lets the waste of hogs, which carry many human diseases, be captured by nothing more than a cesspool. The poultry waste is far less a problem. The state had few rules for industrial farming until 1993, when it enacted a law to prohibit livestock farms from intentionally contaminating the public water supply. Then, two years ago, it put a moratorium on hog farms. In Duplin County, 50 miles south of Raleigh, and the home to 42,000 people and 2.2 million hogs, Dr. Hervy Kornegay, a family physician and chairman of the County Board of Health, said no disease attributable to the flooding had developed. But as waste seeps into the private wells that half the homes use for drinking water, Dr. Kornegay said, "the greatest potential for harm would be severe gastroenteritis, with diarrhea and vomiting." And the seepage is under way. Ronnie Kennedy, county director for environmental health, said that of 310 private wells he had tested for contamination since the storm, 9 percent, or three times the average of across eastern North Carolina, had fecal coliform bacteria. Normally, tests showing any hint of feces in drinking water, an indication that it can be carrying disease-causing pathogens, is cause for immediate action. Even before the hurricane there had been flooding and ruptures of the waste pits that contaminated rivers and killed millions of fish. And with public fury rising over the acrid, ammonia-laden odors from the waste lagoons, which carry for more than a mile, Governor Hunt had begun to call for restraints on an industry he had long allowed free rein. Mr. Hunt, a Democrat, backs the Legislature's 1997 moratorium on construction of new and expanded lagoons, which remain in effect until July 2001. In April, the Governor proposed a plan to phase out the lagoon system over 10 years while engineers devise safer methods for disposing of the hog waste. He also brought a former Sierra Club lobbyist, Mr. Holman, the environmental protection official, into his administration. "My views and most views have evolved to where we have to take stronger action to clear up our water and rivers," Governor Hunt said. "We need a strong economy for our people, but we cannot sacrifice the environment for jobs." Any legislation to tighten regulations on hog farms meets the stiff resistance of companies like Murphy Family Farms, the nation's biggest hog producer. The industry, whose North Carolina Pork Council vies with tobacco as the state's mightiest lobby, contends that the lagoon system held up well in the storm, that the bacteria in wells might have come not from hogs but from people, factories, flooded water treatment plants or migrating geese. The council said that only 3 of some 4,000 waste lagoons ruptured To protect the system, the council sent the state's Congressional delegation in Washington a document, dated Sept. 29 and entitled, "Draft Legislation for Flood Relief for Farmers in Eastern North Carolina." It seeks $1 billion in grants for farmers in 41 counties to repair or replace storm-damaged facilities, including waste lagoons, as they were originally built. Governor Hunt said of the document, "It's 'stunning and it's wrong." Beth Anne Mumford, the council's spokeswoman, said the document, disclosed on Oct. 8 by The News & Observer of Raleigh, had been misunderstood. "Its intent was to be sure assistance wasn't prohibited," Ms. Mumford said. "We're not illegal operations, so we shouldn't be punished." Nowhere is the industry more entrenched, or its political power stronger, or the hurricane's farm damage greater, than in Duplin County. With 48 hogs for every one resident, the county has the densest concentration of hogs in the country. The rectangular lagoons of reddish-brown waste, many of them covering more than an acre, dot the flat countryside. Enclosed within dikes, the lagoons sit behind rows of single-story, gray-metal structures as large as football fields that house the hogs. The hog waste flows through slotted boards in the barns to a cellar, from where it is carried by plastic pipes to a waste lagoon. The lagoons now and then burp with the bubbles that mark the natural transformation of feces and urine to the nutrients that farmers spray over pastures and fields of corn, tobacco, soybeans and rye. In the hurricane, said Rick Shiver, regional supervisor for the State Division of Water Quality, many of the lagoons flooded and the three that ruptured were in Duplin County. The lagoon at Jesse Lanier's farm, with 1,200 hogs, was breached when a stream rose and eroded the base of its dike. More than two million gallons of the lagoon's waste spilled into Rock Fish Creek, which feeds the North East Cape Fear River. At Rabon Maready's farm, Mr. Shiver said, 1,000 of 1,600 hogs drowned in the storm. Both lagoons there flooded and one ruptured in five spots. Two lagoons at Joey Brinkley's 4,572-hog farm flooded, and a 12-foot breach opened in one of them. Mr. Maready and Mr. Brinkley are contract farmers for Murphy Family Farms of Rose Hill, on the southern edge of the county. Two of the ruptured lagoons were on farms under contract to Murphy Family Farms of Rose Hill, on the southern edge of the county. Wendell Murphy, the company's founder and chief executive and a major contributor to Governor Hunt's campaigns, perfected the current system of raising hogs for producers. It is the major reason the state's hog population has grown to more than nine million from less than three million a decade ago. Mr. Murphy was a State Senator for 10 years, until 1992, and as a legislator supported measures curbing counties' power to zone out hog farms. Mr. Murphy would not comment for this article, said his spokeswoman, Lois Britt. Ms. Britt said the company believed that counties should look within for solutions to the environmental issues. "It's easy to look from outside and say what's wrong," she said. She said hog farming provided jobs and tax revenue. "The hog lagoons," she added, "held up fine." Clearly, many farmers have mastered the intricate balance of waste production, lagoon levels and spraying. The Division of Water Quality said that it had never recorded a complaint against the hog farm of Tony Jones, 30, of Mount Olive. Like nearly all hog farmers, Mr. Jones works under contract to a producer. He raises 4,100 pigs in six barns and has two waste lagoons. He said he constantly tests the lagoon waste. "If it needs lime to keep the odor down," he said, "I add lime. If it needs pumping, I pump on days that are optimum for pumping." But other farms stir frequent complaints. Becky and Danny Lancaster, who operate a rural welding supply business, live within a mile of three farms they call offensive. Mrs. Lancaster, the mother of two teen-agers, said: "You don't plan birthday parties outside. You no longer plan things. You plan around the odors and flies." She keeps a log of odors that waft her way. In September, she made entries on six days. "Nasty, musty, stifling odor in the air," she wrote on Sept. 9, a humid and rainy day. "Difficult to breathe. Feel like suffocating. Like an old outhouse." On Sept. 23, she wrote, "Smell of urine strong in air." She produced another log she used to keep of the flies she swatted in the office. On May 22, 1996, she said, "I killed 1,192. The next day I killed 1,100. The next day it was 1,140." Flies appear in January, too. For years, said H. C. Powers, a 77-year-old retired school principal and current chairman of the six-member Duplin County Board of Commissioners, residents have been complaining of odors and flies. But three board members always support the industry, so attempts by Mr. Powers and two others to regulate the farms die in three-to-three votes. Still, many people here say more pollution control would only imperil more farmers, who are already struggling. Pork prices have been plunging for more than a year, so much so that Mr. Murphy has agreed to sell out, for $450 million, to Smithfield Farms Inc. of Virginia, the nation's leading slaughterhouse. The County Manager, James W. Barnhardt Jr., said farms in the county that had $620 million in revenue two years ago are expected to receive $170 million less this year. "We are trying to diversify," Mr. Barnhardt said. "On the other hand, Duplin County is a rural agricultural county. That's what we do."

Heavy rains partially diluted pollution threat from Floyd (Copyright © 1999 Nando Media Copyright © 1999 Associated Press Helping the hurricane victims By EMERY P. DALESIO) RALEIGH, N.C. (October 2, 1999 9:38 p.m. EDT http://www.nandotimes.com) - Dangerous bacteria and chemicals flushed into North Carolina waterways by Hurricane Floyd's disastrous flood haven't caused widespread health problems, but long-term environmental damage remains to be seen, state officials say. So far, there are relatively few reports of cholera, mosquito-borne diseases or other illness from contact with polluted water or mud - even as thousands of people return to homes they evacuated when Floyd dumped up to 20 inches of rain last month. "It's definitely a silver lining. It's one of the few items of good news we've received," said Johanna Reese, a spokeswoman for the state Division of Environmental Health. On Saturday, flood waters continued to threaten low-lying communities as rain from storms this week caused rivers to crest again. The federal government expects to buy up to 10,000 homes in an effort to move residents and businesses off flood plains. "It will be our worst flood disaster in the Southeast ever," said Todd Davison with the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Across the state, the flood inundated 23 municipal sewage treatment plants and more than 50 livestock waste lagoons, flushing out thousands of gallons of bacteria-laden waste. The carcasses of thousands of drowned livestock will pose health risks until they are incinerated or buried. Chemicals and petroleum products leaked from gas stations, junkyards, farms and chemical plants. As the pollutants are carried downstream to the Atlantic, fish will likely die. The extent of the damage may not be known for weeks, said Larry Cahoon, a biological-science professor at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington who inspected the mouth of the Cape Fear River on Friday. "It's awful brown out there. The crew of the ship told me they've never seen it that bad," said Cahoon, who estimates the brown water has spread across 200 square miles of the Atlantic. Water contaminated by bacteria from feces could cause gastrointestinal diseases, and dehydration from severe vomiting or diarrhea could be fatal for young children, the elderly and people with weakened immune systems. However, samples taken from more than 100 inland sites show levels of fecal coliform bacteria are a lot lower than expected, said Ernie Seneca, a state spokesman. Chemical pollutants have been diluted by the huge volumes of water left by Floyd, said Dan Thornton, an emergency response coordinator for the Environmental Protection Agency. Pollutants include mercury and chromium spilled from at least six industrial sites, said Bill Meyer, the state's top hazardous waste regulator. Along with chemical spills, half of 51 sites visited by state inspectors had damage to underground fuel storage tanks, Meyer said. About 1,550 service stations and oil distributors were flooded, and some 20,000 tanks holding home heating oil or other fuel haven't been checked, Meyer said. On Saturday, dirty-brown water stood waist-deep in parts of Kinston. "We're still in a crisis," said Reginald Lee, a Lenoir County emergency management spokesman. Two hundred businesses and thousands of homes were flooded in the county. Clyde Cox, 77, a retired municipal worker, sloshed through his Kinston yard in hip waders, wearing a white surgical mask to block the rotten stench. "It's the first time it's ever been in the yard in 30 years," said Cox, who had no flood insurance. "All the flooding we've had, it's the first time. Any help I can get, I sure would appreciate it."

Perdue Offers a Plan to Fight Odor and Pollution (NY Times, FRANCIS X. CLINES, October 19, 1999) LAUREL, Del. -- Here in the heart of the busiest poultry-growing area in the world, there are remarkably few chickens in plain sight across the gentle countryside, but Frank LeCates can smell the birds all about him. "Chicken farms, I'm surrounded by chicken farms -- 35 of 'em all around me," bewailed LeCates, whose 79 years coincide with the poultry industry's growth to its dominant position across the lower Delmarva Peninsula. "It's a desperate situation, a stinky situation, putrid even some days when I have to burn pine branches in the yard to try and dispel the smell." LeCates said it helped very little that the chickens are raised inside low-lying, silvery, sealed barns with powerful ventilation fans. These barns quietly mark the pastoral fields like extra-terrestrial dormitories in a vast poultry universe. Six hundred million chickens a year come and go from 2,700 family farms on the peninsula, leaving 600,000 tons of what the industry calls litter and what LeCates calls abomination. While other agricultural areas offer autumnal tableaux of piled pumpkins and dried corn stalks, for the hard-working chicken farmers of Delaware and the Eastern Shore of Maryland and Virginia, it is "crusting out" time when they dig and truck the thick litter from the barns and pile it in the fields, 6 feet high in some places, for eventual use as local crop fertilizer. But now, prodded by new environmental laws, the industry's regional leader, Perdue Farms Inc., is planning a radical new approach, exportation, to begin dealing with long-running complaints that drainage from chicken manure seriously pollutes vital waterways, from underground wells to the vast resources of Chesapeake Bay. Perdue intends to build a 24-hour-a-day factory here that will collect and treat chicken litter -- a phosphorus- and nitrogen-rich compound that includes excrement and sawdust -- to produce fertilizer pellets for Midwestern farmers. While the proposed factory seems unlikely to ease the complaints of LeCates and other local residents, environmentalists welcome it as a technological breath of fresh air. "We think it's great," said Mike Hirshfield, vice president of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, an environmental watchdog for the tristate region. Such a candid blessing from the foundation is all the more remarkable after the long decades of struggle between environmentalists and the poultry industry, the region's chief employer. But Hirshfield hailed the Perdue plant as a major innovation in what has been a very troubled area. "Of all the options we've seen, this is one of the most promising and it's certainly the one furthest along," he said of the plant, which Perdue hopes to open in a year. Hirshfield said stronger state laws were forcing farmers to adopt various solutions for the problems of runoff from manure, chemical fertilizers and fungicides. The runoff is widely blamed for helping to cause a nutrient imbalance in the bay that is harmful to shellfish and the undersea grasses at the heart of the food chain. "This technology seems able to handle a large fraction of the problem," Hirshfield said. "It seems to be a winner." The factory would treat about 13 percent of the peninsula's chicken litter, and be a test model for what Perdue officials hope will be more local factories across the region in a dramatic solution of shipping out the waste and turning a profit in the process. Perdue plans to truck up to 80,000 tons a year six days a week to the single-story factory that is to be built here on a 210-acre site set back from the road. But LeCates and other residents are far from thrilled that this quiet hamlet of farm and residential neighborhoods will become a funnel, in effect, for far more than its local share of chicken droppings. "It smelled bad in 1931, now it will get 400 times worse," said LeCates, a salesman. He and other residents say they doubt Perdue assurances that there will no more than 10 truckloads of litter a day. The trucks will be covered with tarps, the company promises, and unloaded within a closed $10-million plant tightly designed to thwart environmental runoff from the pellet-making process. LeCates' neighbor down the road, Jerry Taylor, is organizing community opposition from the ramparts of his bait and tackle shop directly across from the farm where the factory is to be built. "I think our county has already sold us out," said Taylor, referring to the Sussex County officials who count agriculture as its principal economic resource. "There are perquisites on the way," he said, referring to county budget benefits, including tax revenues; the estimated 20 jobs the factory will create, and other benefits envisioned by Perdue, a powerful company that employs 20,000 people nationally with annual sales of $2.5 billion. "We smell chicken manure where they smell money," Taylor said of more than 800 petitioners opposing the plant under such names as Citizens' Resistance Against Perdue. Dennis Hearn, who has been a chicken farmer for 20 years, raising 75,000 broilers a year, said, "I'm not too sure about the factory." He warily noted that farmers heavily depend on Perdue and other brand-name buyers, and that any new technology always means higher pass-along costs to the contract farmers. The Chesapeake Bay Foundation stresses that farmers should receive fair value in the litter recycling. And Perdue is promising farmers options to either keep using litter as local fertilizer, sell it at the factory or offer it in exchange for regular barn cleanings. Perdue is operating the factory as a joint venture with AgriRecycle Inc. of Springfield, Mo. Hearn now gives his litter to a neighboring farmer who cleans the barns for free to obtain manure for his crops. But the new laws that prompted the plant are holding farmers responsible for observing far tighter limits on fertilizer use and runoff. "We're completing the recycling loop," said N. Wayne Hudson, director of the proposed plant, noting that vast amounts of feed used on the chicken farms come from the fertilizer-dependent Midwest, where the pellets will be shipped and sold. "We've had inquiries from several states about the technology," he said, describing it as the first of its kind. Down the road from the proposed plant, Bill Beyer, a transplanted New Yorker whose family has run a horse farm here for 20 years, said he had learned to coexist amicably with the chicken farmers. The main problem, he said, seemed to be the secrecy that shrouded the factory plan, which he thought was intended to limit controversy until the precise site was announced as a fait accompli. "It reminds me of the Verrazano Bridge construction," said Beyer, a former resident of Staten Island, which the bridge connected to Brooklyn amid furious opposition from disrupted New York neighborhoods. "Nobody wanted it, but it came," Beyer said, standing near a rustic fence sign that proclaimed, "Horse Manure for Sale."

Michigan middle-schoolers suspended after football team's water tainted (Copyright © 1999 Nando Media Copyright © 1999 Associated Press) MONROE, Mich. (October 20, 1999 1:58 p.m. EDT http://www.nandotimes.com) - Two seventh-grade students have been suspended from their middle school, suspected of spiking the football team's water bottles and sickening 18 players. None of the students who ingested the substance, ammonia nitrate, was seriously ill, but two were taken to the hospital when their symptoms persisted, officials said. The boys believed to be responsible were on the football team and have been suspended. The incident is being called a prank gone bad. But school and law enforcement officials, as well as the students affected and their parents, are taking the situation seriously. "Everyone knows it's serious," Ida Middle School Principal Sheldon Wiens told The Monroe Evening News for a report Wednesday. "But there's not been hysteria." The boys, 12 and 13, have been kicked off the team and suspended from school. On Tuesday, Monroe County Sheriff's Deputy Tod O'Lone handed in his report to the Monroe County prosecutor's office for possible criminal charges. The players were sickened on Oct. 12 during practice. The boys, who were on the team at the time, allegedly tore open the plastic on a product called "Instant Cold Packs." The packs are filled with ammonia nitrate and water and are used commonly by athletes to help ease aches and pains. O'Lone said one boy broke open one of the packs and spiked the team's water bottles with the ammonium nitrate while the other boy acted as a lookout. Teammates then unknowingly drank the poisoned water. Some spit it out right away, saying that it tasted funny. Others didn't notice, officials said. Several hours later, the boys who drank the water became sick.

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