Hog Farmers Scramble to Drain Waste Pools Ahead Of Hurricane Florence
Just inland from the North Carolina coast, right in the path of Hurricane Florence, there's an area where there are many more pigs than people. Each big hog farm has one or more open-air "lagoons" filled with manure, and some could be vulnerable to flooding if the hurricane brings as much rain as feared.
Katy Langley lives downstream from many of those farms. "When you fly over the area, you can't throw a rock without hitting one," she says. "You see these long barns and these square shapes that are Pepto Bismol pink, because swine waste is bright pink. Fun fact of the day!"
It's actually bacteria, feeding on the waste, that turn the ponds pink. These lagoons are like a pile of compost. They're a cheap way to handle animal waste.
But for Langley, the lagoons are a threat. She works for an environmentalist organization called Sound Rivers, and she's specifically assigned to protect the Neuse River. With thousands of those lagoons just sitting there, open to the weather, with a Category 4 hurricane on the way, Langley is worried that a whole lot of manure is going to wash into the rivers.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/09/11/646790793/hog-farmers-scramble-to-drain-waste-pools-ahead-of-hurricane-florence
