Hurricane Safety and Preparedness

Florence's Health Threats: Sewage Spilled, Millions of Chickens and Pigs Die, Hog Waste Holding Pond Breached

Hurricane Florence has unleashed several toxic health threats in the wake of the storm which could pose threats to residents of the Carolinas.

More than 5 million gallons of partially treated sewage spilled into the Cape Fear River after the power went out at a treatment plant, officials said, and the earthen dam of a pond holding hog waste was breached, spilling its contents. Several other pig-manure lagoons were flooded and overtopped their banks, the North Carolina Pork Council said.

Exposure to fecal matter could trigger kidney issues, muscle twitching, fatigue, vomiting, diarrhea and stomach pains, among other problems. If the pits of coal ash filled with dangerous levels of mercury, arsenic and lead were to mix with food and water sources, it could trigger numerous health risks, like stomach problems and skin infections.

"This one is pretty scary," Jamie Kruse, director of the Center for Natural Hazards Research at East Carolina University told the AP. "The environmental impacts will be from concentrated animal feeding operations and coal ash pits. Until the system gets flushed out, there’s going to be a lot of junk in the water."

(MORE: All the Latest Florence Impacts)

The storm was also responsible for killing an estimated 3.4 million chickens and turkeys and some 5,500 hogs in North Carolina alone, the North Carolina Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services said Tuesday. The agency said this exceeds the number of poultry deaths reported during Hurricane Matthew in 2016.

North Carolina is a major producer of poultry and hogs. The state’s 9 million hogs are traditionally kept in metal or wooden sheds with grated floors. To contain the massive amounts of manure that accompanies the hogs, the sheds are intentionally designed to facilitate the animal waste to fall out of the sheds and flow into what are referred to as manure pits or lagoons, which contain millions of gallons of untreated sewage, according to the AP.

With floods, these lagoons run the risk of overflowing into crop fields and nearby waterways.

The state’s coal ash dumps pose a different sort of health threat. Two years ago, Duke Energy Corp. was ordered to clean up coal-ash ponds around North Carolina that posed serious environmental and public health risks, Bloomberg reported.

Since power plants need vast amounts of water to generate steam, "Their unlined waste pits are located along lakes and rivers. Some of the pits were inundated during past storms, including during Floyd and Hurricane Matthew in 2016," the AP reported.

State regulators forced the company to phase out the coal ash pits by 2029 in response to a 2014 spill, which lined 70 miles of the Dan River in toxic sludge. "Because that work [to phase out the pits] was already underway, wastewater levels inside the ash ponds have been falling," Duke Energy spokesman Bill Norton said Tuesday, according to the AP.

The Environmental Protection Agency has also monitored nine toxic waste cleanup sites near the Carolinas coast for potential flooding. More than a dozen such Superfund sites in and around Houston flooded last year in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, with spills of potentially hazardous materials reported at two.