From chicken guts in small-town Siler City to a major sewage spill in urban Winston-Salem, the shadow of environmental racism continues to haunt North Carolina communities today.
North Carolina has become known as the birthplace of the American environmental justice movement. (A leader in the 1982 case featured in that article will be the 2022 Green Tie Awards keynote speaker—see the next CIB item.) However, two incidents which made news over the past week highlight how much remains to be done to deal with the legacy of environmental injustice here today.
First, consider the chicken guts and parts which lined the banks of a stream receiving the wastewater discharges of small-town Siler City’s sewage treatment facility. The community is home to a workforce of many recent Latino immigrant families drawn there by available jobs in the chicken processing plant. Desperate to reactivate the plant which had already lost two previous owners, both town and county governments had showered current owner Mountaire with incentive payments to re-open it. The incentives agreement failed to specify pre-treatment requirements for the plant’s discharges into the town’s sewage treatment facility.
The town’s facility has been overwhelmed by the volume of waste from Mountaire. Their Siler City slaughterhouse is one of the nation’s largest, sending more than a million gallons of effluent a day to the town’s sewage plant. Regularly failing to meet state pollution control requirements, the sewage facility fouls the receiving stream and the Rocky River downstream. Since the slaughterhouse re-opened, the treatment facility has incurred 80 notices of violation and over $110,000 in fines. It is under state orders to shape up, and in the meantime cannot accept any new customer connections.
Both the town and the slaughterhouse deny any connection to the mystery dumps of chicken guts.
The town/company interplay is a typical economic mismatch, with the small town unwilling or unable to require the large corporation’s plant to control the problems created by its huge effluent load. Instead, the environment and downstream neighbors pay the price of pollution.
From Siler City, next look west into the urban heart of the City of Winston-Salem. There, an 80,000-gallon spill of raw sewage last week entered a small stream over the course of 31 hours. The contaminated stream flows behind mostly Black, and mostly poor urban neighborhoods before winding its way through the heart of a heavily-used city park and between an elementary school and its playground. The spill took place last Tuesday, and as of Friday no local environmental alert to impacted neighborhoods had been issued.
A contractor for the city/county utility system made an error which led directly to this spill. In the process of systemwide improvement work, the contractor erroneously redirected sewage flow into an abandoned section of piping. From there, it spilled out into the stream.
The subsequent failure to promptly notify impacted neighborhoods and park users about the spill is especially troubling in light of the high volume of waste dumped into a small stream where children could be exposed to high levels of harmful bacteria. The spill was more than 80 times the threshold for mandatory news media notification. The incident is under state environmental review now.
These situations are far from unique, and serve as timely reminders of the scope of the continuing problem. Low-income communities and communities of color, both urban and rural, are disproportionately impacted by both routine permitted pollution discharges and by illegal spills and discharges. Correcting this systemic injustice has rightly become a priority of the citizen environmental movement.
