First I found out that Smithfield Foods has turned parts of eastern North Carolina into a festering pool of pig poop, and now I find out that the area is home to an unexploded H-Bomb that plunged into a swampy field when the the B-52 carrying it crashed in 1961.   Lenslinger wrote about it and I decided to look into it a little more since, well, it’s kind of a wild story.

The bomb plunged into the ground and thankfully didn’t explode in a place called Faro, NC.  One Google search on "faro north carolina" brings me to the NC Department of Environment and Natural Resources’ Emergency Response and Environmental Branch.  Here’s the description from their site:

In addition to nuclear facilities and the statewide network,
ERM performs environmental monitoring at four other sites:

• Pulstar, a
    research reactor located at NC State University in Raleigh
   
• PCS Phosphate,
    a phosphogypsum mining and manufacturing facility in Aurora
• Faro, NC, the
    crash site of a B-52 carrying nuclear weapons

Nice.  So not only did a bomb drop 45 years ago, but it’s considered a significant enough risk that the state nuclear inspectors still keep an eye on the site.

Whatever thoughts I had about someday living on that side of the state have pretty much been killed by the idea of wading through possibly radioactive pig crap to find a house that will cost a mint to insure due to the hurricanes that hit the area often enough that the hockey team is named the Hurricanes.  The mountains it is.