The Unequal Distribution of Catastrophe in North Carolina
“The contamination that follows the flood will fall unequally on North Carolinians. The pork industry is rich and politically influential, and in the past two years the state legislature has changed state law to protect hog operations from suits by neighbors whose health and property are damaged by pollution. This is nothing new. The modern environmental-justice movement was born in Afton, North Carolina, in a fight over the state’s decision to dump contaminated soil near a poor, historically African-American community. Wilmington and other down-east towns carry the burdens of Superfund sites and coal-ash ponds, which hold the toxic by-products of coal-fired electricity. A coal-ash landfill near Wilmington has already been breached by floodwaters, though no one is sure how much toxic material has escaped.”
A “natural disaster” is at least half non-natural. It is the product of a natural event and the infrastructure that it floods, shakes, or ignites.
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