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Driving down Highway 41, the main artery in that quarter of Duplin County, things appear normal from a distance. The once-submerged houses along that route are now above water, and mostly appear undamaged. On closer inspection it's clear that almost every house is abandoned. All of the furnishings, carpeting, linoleum, drywall, clothing and household goods of the occupants are piled high in the yards waiting for trucks to haul them away to the dump.

At some houses a pall of black smoke hangs in the air, as the owners pile their contaminated belongings onto enormous, fiery pyres, sending contaminants into the air. The empty houses, without their window dressings or drywall, doors and windows open wide, appear skeletal, like gaping skulls.

The floodwaters in Duplin County were so contaminated by drowned hogs, spilled and overflowing hog lagoons, drowned poultry, human sewage and other contaminants as to render anything soaked by them unsalvageable. Most area residents are picking up bottled water, afraid that the groundwater and rivers from which the people of Chinquapin draw their water are so thoroughly contaminated that it will be years before it's safe to drink again.

They're probably right. Leon Chesnin, professor emeritus of waste management and utilization at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, said that it takes 20 years for the waste from a hog lagoon overflow or spill to filter down through the groundwater and another 20 years to clean itself. That means the water will be contaminated for another 40 years, two generations.

In addition to animal wastes from an estimated 100 flooded or spilled hog lagoons and a large number of poultry operations, 24 human wastewater treatment plants flooded and hundreds, possibly thousands of tanks containing petroleum products, pesticides and other chemicals spilled into the waters. Thousands of flooded homes, businesses, automobiles and junkyards released toxic chemicals into the floodwaters.

A hurricane may be an act of God, but the magnitude of the environmental disaster in North Carolina was strictly man-made. Much of the flooding and the groundwater contamination can be attributed to the state's furious drainage and development of wetlands areas, and its resistance to vigilant environmental regulation of agribusiness.

Since North Carolina began draining its 11 million acres of wetlands in the 1700s, more than half of them have been lost. Between the mid-1970s and the mid-1980s, North Carolina led the nation in lost wetlands acreage, says Derb Carter of the Southern Environmental Center. The state still issues permits to drain around 1,000 acres of wetlands every year, he says, and others estimate that the illegal loss of wetlands runs more than twice that.

Although Gov. James B. Hunt is calling Floyd a "500-year flood" and assuring residents that it will not happen again during their lifetimes, that's not strictly accurate. In fact, heavy rains began again Monday night and were expected to continue at least through Wednesday.

"It wouldn't take much rain to bring the floods back up to the same levels as a week ago, or higher," says Stanley Riggs, a marine geologist at East Carolina University who specializes in the study of North Carolina's estuaries and coastal systems. "This whole [river] system is just waiting to go again."

Next page | Relatively small hurricanes