Flying over the state’s eastern coastal region last week, it was hard to tell where the floodwaters ended and the lagoons containing millions of gallons of hog excrement began—although you could still smell the stench from a thousand feet in the air.

The waste within the lagoons is usually bright pink—the Pepto-Bismol color the result of anaerobic respiration—and jumps out among the region’s rolling green fields and lush wooded stretches. But after Hurricane Florence dumped an estimated eight trillion gallons of rain on the state, the liquid inside many of lagoons in the floodplain looked identical to the dark floodwaters surrounding it.

In the town of Harrells, where flooding appeared to have retreated, a massive hog lagoon full of this dark liquid showed a distinct opening in the corner, with black veins of waste spilling out and cutting through brush, working their way toward Little Tomahawk Creek.

“That’s one helluva breach,” said Waterkeeper Alliance cofounder Rick Dove, as the small plane he was in circled the farm.

This is one of many compromised lagoons the Alliance’s volunteers claim to have observed on daily flights since the category 1 storm began its crippling assault on September 14. Florence’s human toll is still being assessed, but the state has reported thirty-one deaths and thousands of damaged homes from widespread flooding, which continued to ravage coastal communities through this weekend as floodwaters crested the Neuse River at historic heights.

The southeastern region most severely affected by the storm is also home to North Carolina’s highest concentration of hog farms, where 90 percent of the state’s estimated nine million pigs are bred for slaughter. The animals live in massive holding pens, their waste dropped through slats in the floor, then liquefied and stored in nearby in Olympic swimming pool–sized open-air lagoons. Once those lagoons fill up, their contents are sprayed as fertilizer onto fields. (In a series of lawsuits, more than five hundred neighbors of the state’s hog farms have claimed this process of waste disposal creates a nuisance that adversely affects the enjoyment of their property.)

Many poultry farms are located in the same vicinity. So far, the N.C. Department of Agriculture has reported 3.4 million chickens and 5,500 pigs killed as a result of the storm. Video footage has shown hogs wading neck-deep through floodwaters and dead chickens floating like dirty pillows in the dark water.

At least three hog lagoons have breached, the N.C. Pork Council has reported, with two more that may have structural damage, twenty-one lagoons that are inundated by floodwaters, and seventeen lagoons that are overflowing. Those numbers represent a tiny fraction of the state’s twenty-one hundred farms and thirty-three hundred lagoons, the Pork Council points out.

“While we are dismayed by the release of some liquids from some lagoons, we also understand that what has been released from the farms is the result of a once-in-a-lifetime storm and that the contents are highly diluted with rainwater,” the Council said in a release last week.

Dove and Waterkeeper Alliance attorney Will Hendrick aren’t convinced that will lessen the danger to people in flooded communities. In 2016, Hurricane Matthew delivered less rain and resulted in fewer animal deaths, yet four months after that storm, ambient water testing revealed elevated levels of fecal coliform, a bacterial indicator used to assess the presence of other pathogens harmful to humans, Hendrick says.

In addition to hog waste and deceased animals, toxic coal ash from a Duke Energy landfill reportedly contaminated the Cape Fear River on Friday after a dam breach at Sutton Lake. The ash contains arsenic and mercury, among other contaminants.

Testing on Florence’s floodwaters is underway.

Dove, who has lived on the Neuse River since the 1970s, says he’s seen this all before. Increasingly intense storms have been flooding the same lowland farms for the last two decades, he adds. Most recently, about twenty-eight hundred pigs were killed during Matthew. In 1999, Hurricane Floyd killed twenty-one thousand hogs, and subsequent investigations into working conditions and waste management practices prompted the state to buy up and relocate dozens of flood-prone farms.

Following this voluntary buyout, however, 62 flood-prone farms with 166 lagoons remain in vulnerable areas.

Still, after each storm, the flooding recedes, the news crews clear out, and nothing changes, Dove says. Inevitably, “the next storm comes through, and it’s the same thing,” Dove says.

But even under sunny skies, Hendrick argues, these industrial hog farms remain problematic, thanks to their anachronistic waste-disposal systems.

Avoiding future hazards will require mandating more environmentally friendly waste-management technology on existing hog operations and removing these facilities from the hundred-year floodplain, Hendrick says. But that’s unlikely to happen, at least in the near future, as such reforms would require legislative action and likely cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

In recent years, the General Assembly has sought to protect the industry from lawsuits that would hold it responsible for the alleged ill effects of its waste system—first, by limiting the amount of money plaintiffs in nuisance lawsuits can receive, then by placing further restrictions on the conditions under which hog-farm neighbors can sue.

This year, Smithfield Foods—the world’s largest pork producer—has lost three nuisance cases in federal court in Raleigh, the latest being a $473 million verdict against the company, which was reduced to about $94 million because of the state’s cap on punitive damages.

Smithfield’s contracted farmers are often underpaid and should not bear the responsibility for cleaning up the industry’s mess, Hendrick says.

“I think [Smithfield] has the means to correct his problem, and moreover has been profiting of years by externalizing costs to surrounding communities,” he says. “They should be the one to the foot this bill.”

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