People everywhere watched helplessly last fall as hurricanes Florence and Michael pounded North Carolina with a record 8 trillion gallons of rain that flooded hog waste lagoons and spilled their toxic content into our rivers, streams and wetlands.
But the full impact of the breached and over-topped lagoons was not apparent until a few weeks later, when NASA satellite images showed huge blooms of discolored organic matter spreading flower-like into the Atlantic from the mouths of North Carolina’s rivers.
How much of that was hog waste? We’ll never know. But those pictures helped energize a broad-based campaign to rein in North Carolina’s hog industry and hold it accountable for the social injustices, and environmental and public health disasters it is causing.