Duke experts: Contaminants from flooding in NC hurricanes a risk to environment

Environmental experts from Duke University on Wednesday discussed North Carolina’s hurricane season, including preparedness, flooding and the associated spread of contaminants.

Despite the distraction of COVID-19, experts agreed there is more organized preparedness ahead of hurricane season in recent years, due in part to the catastrophic impacts from Hurricane Matthew and Hurricane Florence.

“A pandemic hits and suddenly, you know, all the community resources and the community planning has to be redirected toward a new crisis,” said Megan Mullin, PhD, a professor of environmental politics.

WRAL meteorologists record updates daily during Atlantic hurricane season, which runs through November. Watch here.

There is still progress to be made in hurricane preparedness.

“We catch people’s attention the most when we’re immediate post-storm,” Mullin added. “That’s when everybody wants to talk about what are we gonna do next and how are we going to recover? But often we don’t make the best decisions at those moments in time.”

Flooding and its impact on the environment needs to be studied along with preparedness methods, experts said.

Lee Ferguson, an environmental chemical analyst, said contaminants are a big problem in North Carolina from hog farms and industrial agriculture during flooding events.

“There’s always at least low level inputs of these sources into our waterways … so what happens under those circumstances is that we have areas of our landscape that are normally dry that are inundated completely with floodwaters,” Ferguson said.

This was a problem when Hurricane Florence hit the state in 2018, which Ferguson called our state’s wettest hurricane.

Another problem is N.C.’s wastewater treatment plants, which are often situated in low-lying areas.

“This is by design because the downhill flow of wastewater makes it easier to collect that wastewater,” Ferguson explained. “However, that presents a risk when we have flooding events … when you have a massive amount of wastewater coming to those plants as well as inundation of the treatment systems.”

Ferguson said problems with contaminants can manifest in any communities impacted by floodwaters, but small communities alongside waterways are especially at risk.

Finding solutions

It’s important to be able to recover from storm events, but experts said infrastructure needs to be rebuilt in a resilient way, especially with climate change.

“We need to be thinking about this from a climate standpoint because extreme storms [are starting] to become not the exception the norm … we need to be able to armor our water and wastewater infrastructure against these climate-induced extreme events,” experts said.

This can be done by constructing or redesigning wastewater treatment plants to be more protective against flood inundation.

The change could not just protect residents but farmers who struggle when their crops are flooded.