Environmental impact of Hurricane Frances
unknown
By Willy Rosencrans
Asheville, North Carolina, Sept. 15 (AGR)— Hurricane
Frances left a message in its wake: think twice about what gets set
in the floodplain. A week after the storm rolled through western North
Carolina, dumping up to sixteen inches of rain, clean-up crews are working
overtime to haul hazardous material containers out of the area’s
rivers before Hurricane Ivan arrives.
Seventy-five home-heating oil tanks and 200 miscellaneous 55-gallon
drums were washed into area waterways; five 30,000-gallon oil tanks
(at Smoky Mountain Petroleum) and two 20,000-gallon tanks (at Mountain
Energy) were knocked over by the flood, losing an as-yet unspecified
amount of oil product. The smell of petroleum on the banks of the French
Broad River for several days after the deluge was overpowering and still
lingers.
In addition, several million gallons of raw sewage were disgorged from
the overtaxed sewer systems of towns across the area. Wastewater treatment
facilities were underwater throughout Avery, Buncombe, Haywood, Jackson,
McDowell, Mitchell, and Rutherford counties, including the one serving
the paper mill in Canton; there are no estimates yet of how much untreated
wastewater entered the Toe, French Broad, and Pigeon Rivers, but, again,
it is in multiples of millions of gallons.
The environmental impact of it all has not yet been calculated. But
the figures themselves are intimidating enough to have spawned a number
of rumors:
Fifteen hundred Asheville residents, for example, are said to have been
stricken with dysentery or other gastro-intestinal disorders from sewage-tainted
water; so are 500 Warren Wilson College students. Cholera and hepatitis
are flourishing. And a chemical storage facility somewhere on the banks
of the French Broad released an untold amount of napalm and Agent Orange
into the river.
Testing of the water has been done many times daily over the past week
by Asheville’s Water Department lab, says administrative services
manager Rebecca Guggenheim; it is free of pathogens. Meryl Gregory of
Mission St. Joseph Hospital says hospital staff have not seen a spike
in gastro-intestinal illnesses since the flood; Debra Gentry of the
Buncombe County Health Department says the same. And Karen Weinberg
says there have been no cases of dysentery at Warren Wilson College.
And no facility is storing Agent Orange or napalm in the area.
There are legitimate environmental and health concerns. Other hazardous
materials besides oil are held or processed near the waterways –
at the paper mill in Canton, for example. But there is not yet a list
of water contaminants.
“A sampling effort will get underway when we have the time,”
says Terrence Byrd, the division supervisor of the Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA) crew which was dispatched here after a state of emergency
was declared for Buncombe and fourteen other counties. “Right now
we’re just trying to expedite the process of recovery [of containers]
before the next hurricane.”
Eight EPA members, a five-man US Coast Guard team, two Superfund Technical
Assistance and Response teams, and local fire and other departments
are searching the rivers for containers, more of which are being found
as the waters recede.
Byrd says that any oil lost will have washed downstream early in the
flooding and that there is no reason to worry about riverbank contamination
– “residual ground contamination will typically be restricted
to the site of the spill.”
There were other, more immediately noticeable effects of the flooding
in Asheville. The water supply was shut down in some areas entirely,
and those that had water were under a six-day-long “boil water
advisory” from the Health Department in case of coliform contamination.
The Red Cross set up four distribution centers in the city to provide
bottled water for the almost 100,000 people dependent on its water system.
Some businesses in the floodplain were effectively wiped out, and restaurants
remained closed, keeping thousands out of work. Mission-St. Joseph,
the largest hospital in the Asheville area, experienced a sufficient
drop in water pressure to warn that they could treat only very severe
medical cases.
The environmental impact, by contrast, is still hidden. A thorough assessment
will require weeks or months, and Ivan is expected to hit the area shortly,
possibly followed by rain from tropical storm Jeanne. The city is opening
the floodgates to the North Fork Reservoir to possibly prevent a repeat
of last week’s disaster (there has been some criticism of the city
for not doing the same before Frances arrived).
There are no zoning regulations preventing wastewater treatment facilities,
petroleum companies, and the like from being established on the local
floodplain. But flooded or not, local rivers face some big challenges.
For most of the last century, the Pigeon River ran brown and foamy from
the Canton paper mill; it was an environmental disaster for which Tennesse
filed suit against the mill (and lost). It is currently allowed to discharge
30 million gallons of wastewater into the river daily.
North Carolina permits the discharge of more than 90 million gallons
of wastewater daily into the French Broad and its tributaries. The Metropolitan
Sewerage District plant in Asheville collects sewage from 950 miles
of lines and pumps 29.9 million gallons of treated water a day into
the French Broad -- an improvement over the unregulated dumping of 30
years ago.
And the recent closure of the Ecusta paper mill in Transylvania County,
bordering the French Broad, leaves maintenance of its 300 million gallon,
75 acre wastewater lagoon in danger; the lagoon contains arsenic and
heavy metals.
