Florence's Toxic Toll Can Be Laid Directly At The Feet Of NC GOP And NC GOP Voters

[hatrack]

EDIT


North Carolina’s power utility, Duke Energy, responded to these lawsuits differently. “They spent years lobbying to try to avoid this litigation,” said Frank Holleman, a senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center who fought Duke in court. Duke also sought help from North Carolina’s Republican political leaders, donating hundreds of thousands to their campaigns and political committees—particularly during “key moments in state coal ash regulation,” one report noted. In turn, the state’s legislature has often assisted the company in delaying excavation of coal ash storage sites. Republican lawmakers in North Carolina became more reluctant to allow Duke to delay excavation after one of the company’s pits spilled a massive amount of waste into the Dan River in 2014. The legislature passed requirements for coal ash cleanup and created an independent commission to oversee the work. But then-Governor Pat McCrory, a Republican who had worked at Duke Energy for 28 years, lent a hand to his former employer by shutting down the commission in 2016.

North Carolina still has at least 13 unlined pits filled with millions of tons of coal ash, which risk overflowing or breaching during big rainfall or flooding events. But South Carolina’s present-day reality shows that “this a totally unnecessary risk,” Holleman said. “The ash does not have to be placed in a pit near a river.”

Hog farming is also a major industry in North Carolina, and Hurricane Florence caused dozens of man-made ponds filled with pig feces to overflow. Last week, The New York Times reported that “at least 110 lagoons in the state have either released pig waste into the environment or are at imminent risk of doing so.” This was expected: It had happened as recently as 2016, due to Hurricane Matthew, and more devastatingly with Hurricane Floyd in 1999.

North Carolina does not allow newly built industrial hog farms to store urine and feces from their animals in these literal cesspools. But existing farms are still allowed to, despite what happened during Matthew and Floyd. “Environmentally superior technologies exist to handle animal waste, such as the Terra Blue technology, which separates liquid and solid waste, composting the solids,” wrote Rick Dove, a founder of the Waterkeeper Alliance, in a recent Washington Post op-ed. “But the industry has dragged its feet on upgrading its waste management; thanks to friends of industrial agriculture in North Carolina’s legislature, such changes aren’t required by law.”

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https://newrepublic.com/article/151362/republicans-responsible-hurricane-florence-damage-north-carolina

[duforsure]

1. They'll pay the price for letting the gop do this to them now

And they'll see major health issues increases for years to all there from this. If they want to do this to themselves , I guess they have that right to do this now, but it makes no sense people would allow them to do this to them. Vote people , and change it to protect the people, not a CEO's bottom line and profits.

[DURHAM D]

2. From the article and really needs to be highlighted -

then-Governor Pat McCrory, a Republican who had worked at Duke Energy for 28 years, lent a hand to his former employer by shutting down the commission in 2016.