Did you know that 26 million gallons of municipal wastewater (sewage) were released across North Carolina due to Hurricane Florence? The North Carolina Division of Environmental Quality (NCDEQ) requires that facilities with permits for waste management, such as hog farms and industry, report waste releases.

For Florence, NCDEQ received over 1,800 reports, and of those reports, 146 were waste releases. Most of these incident reports (58 percent) were for municipal wastewater treatment plants. These facilities had 85 confirmed releases with reported totals of 26 million gallons of untreated wastewater discharges.

Industry had 40 releases with 6500 gallons discharged, and agriculture had 21 hog lagoon releases with no volumes reported. Most of the human sewage releases occurred in the counties of Stanly, Guilford, Randolph, Alamance and Davidson.

This analysis shows that municipal wastewater treatment systems are more likely to release untreated waste during extreme storms. That waste disproportionately impacted vulnerable rural communities downstream.

Waste release incident reports were collected from the Hurricane Incident Tracking Application at the NCDEQ, analyzed by undergraduate students Daniel Amparo and Theresa Flood, then visualized by graduate student Shane Beeson under the guidance of Dr. Elizabeth Guthrie Nichols at NC State University.

Daniel Amparo is a fourth-year studying environmental technology and management. Theresa Flood is a first-year studying life sciences.