Nobody likes “regulations” until your drinking water is filled with hog feces

When you hear Republicans carry on about “regulations” and say they need to be “cut” because “the economy.” Please ask them to be specific. Because more often than not they are talking about cutting regulations that are designed to do things like deal with the millions of gallons of untreated sewage produced by industrial hog farms.

The heavy rain expected from Hurricane Florence could flood hog manure pits, coal ash dumps and other industrial sites in North Carolina, creating a noxious witches’ brew of waste that might wash into homes and threaten drinking water supplies.

Computer models predict more than 3 feet of rain in the eastern part of the state, a fertile low-lying plain veined by brackish rivers with a propensity for escaping their banks. Longtime locals don’t have to strain their imaginations to foresee what rain like that can do. It’s happened before.