Floodwaters from Hurricane Florence have breached a 1,100-acre cooling lake dam at the L.V. Sutton Power Station in North Carolina, about 8 miles northwest of Wilmington, Duke Energy told Axios. The power plant, which now runs on natural gas, has shut down in response to the flooding.
Why it matters: Coal ash contains hazardous heavy metals that are harmful to human health, such as arsenic and mercury. If these pollutants enter water supplies, they pose a serious hazard to public health.
Five days of flooding in North Carolina, the state with the second-most pigs in the United States, continues to submerge hog lagoons that set up residents nearby for a slew of health, air and environmental problems.
The big picture: North Carolina is home to nearly 10 million pigs, and as water rises more feces and urine from the pig-manure lagoons is exposed at a increasing rate. The North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality said its inspectors have been unable to visit the hardest hit areas or collect samples of the flood water for lab testing, per the Associated Press.
New York House candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez today called Puerto Rico — a territory that lacks statehood and thus the ability to vote — a "colony" of the United States, claiming that Americans must recognize that the island deserves "real self-determination" in order to fix the root causes of Hurricane Maria's devastation.
Between the lines: President Trump has repeatedly praised the U.S. government's response to Hurricane Maria, despite the disaster resulting in close to 3,000 deaths — a figure that Trump disputes. Today, on the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Maria's landfall in Puerto Rico, the White House released a statement calling the response a "historic recovery effort" that has helped Puerto Rico make "significant progress" rebuilding the island after the storm.
