Category Archives: North Carolina

SB1006: Why it Matters

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Winston-Salem Journal managing editor Ken Otterbourg has a great post today on why SB1006 is important here in North Carolina:

I want to get on my soapbox for a few minutes and talk about SB1006,
which is making its way through the General Assembly. It’s another
example of the slow and steady erosion of North Carolina’s
public-records laws. The bill, sponsored by Sen. Tony Rand, of
Fayetteville, carves out an exemption in the public-records law for
public hospitals when they buy private medical practices.

These purchases have been going on for some time, and are part of
the general consolidation in the medical/health care industry, with
hospitals having primary care practices. Forsyth/Novant has these
arrangements. So does WFUBMC, the other 800 lb gorilla at the opposite
end of Hawthorne Road. These are both private, not-for-profit entities,
and, the argument goes, that public hospitals need the same sort of
privacy if they are going to be able to compete.

It’s a common-sense solution, supporters say. To me, the key word in
this debate is public. A hospital that is owned by taxpayers is a
different entity. The money, the assets, the reputation, it’s all owned
by us. If a private hospital wants to overpay for a clinical practice,
that’s OK. But taxpayers ought to know how public officials are
spending their money.

Yep.

Two Editors, Two Decisions on Naming Duke Accuser

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Once the former Duke lacrosse players were proclaimed innocent by Attorney General Roy Cooper the media covering the story had a choice to make: do they or do they not publish the name of the woman who accused the men of rape?  The Raleigh News & Observer decided to and The Winston-Salem Journal decided not to.  What’s interesting about this to me is that the editors explained their reasoning on their blogs.  First from Melanie Sill the N&O‘s executive editor:

During the year since Mangum told police she was assaulted at a
lacrosse team party, The N&O followed its longstanding policy of
not naming claimants in sexual assault cases. This policy is accepted
practice among most print and broadcast media in the United States.

The
N&O has upheld this approach, which the newspaper has followed for
at least 15 years, to avoid discouraging victims of rape and sexual
assault from reporting such crimes. The N&O’s policy regarding
sexual assault claimants has rarely been challenged and we saw no
reason to abandon the policy in the midst of a case.

In recent
weeks The N&O’s senior editors consulted a number of people with an
interest in these issues, among them advocates for sexual assault
victims, defense lawyers, current and former journalists, a district
judge, journalism educators and ethics experts, in considering whether
and under what circumstances to identify Mangum. No consensus emerged,
but the conversations helped us consider essential questions about
precedent and impact.

With the decision of the state attorney
general’s office to drop all charges against Reade Seligmann, Collin
Finnerty and David Evans, no charge of rape or sexual assault exists.
Mangum’s claim has been vehemently denied by the three men indicted in
the case and by their teammates, who believe they have been damaged by
a false accusation. Attorney General Roy Cooper said his office
concluded that the three are innocent.

Mangum also has been
widely identified on the Internet, including on mainstream sites such
as Wikipedia. Because of these circumstances, and in order to more
fully report on the case and its aftermath, we decided to publish her
name. Additionally, we will review our standing policy.

And this from Ken Otterbourg, the Journal’s managing editor:

Yesterday, we had an important decision
about whether to name the accuser in the Duke Lacrosse case. She is the
college student/dancer/mother who was hired to dance at the party and
then made accusations that led to charges that were dismissed by the
Attorney General.

Most news outlets don’t name the accusers in rape cases, although
there are exceptions to every rule. Several newspapers that I respect,
including the News & Observer and The Charlotte Observer, both
decided to name the woman. Her name was widely available prior to this
decision. Here’s the explanation of the N&O’s exec editor, Melanie Sill.

We decided not to. Here’s what our rape policy says, in part:

In the event that an accused rapist is acquitted or released
after being charged [and that charge was reported by us], we will make
significant efforts to detail the story behind the defendant’s success.
In these narrow cases, we may choose to name the accuser if there is
competent evidence that the charges were deliberately bogus. Even in
this event, however, we will not use the names of any victim under 18
years old.

I think the key word here is “deliberately.” To my mind, what AG
Cooper said yesterday is key, that the accuser may actually believe her
stories. I’m not sure her charges were deliberate lies.

While reading about the papers’ internal deliberations is interesting in and of itself, it’s also interesting to read the comments in the posts.  Well at least at the N&O, since as of this writing there’s only one comment at Ken’s and it’s just a small quibble with verbiage.  Some people feel that publishing the name of the "victim" will deter future victims of rape and sexual assault from coming forward. Others argue that it is only fair that the woman’s name be revealed since the mens’ names had been dragged through the mud for a year based on false accusations.  And of course there’s the "liberal press" charges and other vitriol.  All in all, it’s far more interesting and educating than what you read in the papers themselves.

Out of NoVA by the Skin of our Teeth

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As I’ve written many times before I grew up in Northern Virginia.  My family moved there in ’72 when I was in first grade and I lived there until we moved here in ’04.  Celeste’s family moved to Northern Virginia in ’79 and she lived there until we moved.  We both went to college at George Mason University in the heart of Fairfax County so we didn’t even leave the area for school. (Well I spent my freshman year in Nebraska at Concordia College-Seward, but that was really like an extended vacation).

We had several reasons for moving, but probably the most prominent was that we just couldn’t stomach the craziness anymore.  What had once been semi-rural suburbs had been fully developed and it seemed that just about every open space had been paved over and rush hour had grown to an all-day affair.  Hell, there were even traffic jams on Saturday.  If Northern Virginia had remained as it was when we first got out of college we probably would have stayed, but we just couldn’t take what it had become.  We could see first hand that growth in the area was out of control, and each year it seemed the NoVa counties were announcing astounding population growth.  So we got out.

Today I came across this article on WashingtonPost.com that makes me even happier that we left when we did.  Let me give you some numbers and excerpts from the article:

  • Loudoun County has added more than 100,000 people since 2000, increasing its population by 59 percent
  • Prince William County, where Celeste and I lived from ’96-’04 has added 88,000 people since 2000
  • "Fairfax County, the state’s largest jurisdiction, has packed in nearly
    47,000 more residents. The next fastest-growing counties — Stafford,
    Spotsylvania and Culpeper — are on the edges of the expanding region."
  • Overall, the state’s population has grown by 560,000 since 2000
  • "The study also found that 33 cities and counties have lost residents in
    the past six years — older urban areas such as Richmond, Petersburg
    and Roanoke, as well as rural counties in Southside and southwestern
    Virginia. Many of those residents seem to have migrated north, along
    with workers from other parts of the United States and the world who
    have been lured by the Washington job market."

That last item doesn’t surprise me.  Southwestern Virginia, along with northwestern NC, is actually served by many of the media outlets here in Winston-Salem and they are suffering the same economic fate as the rest of the region, with huge chunks of jobs in the furniture and textile industries going overseas.  It shouldn’t surprise anyone that they’re heading to places like Northern Virginia for jobs.

Speaking of jobs, here’s another tidbit from the article:

No other region in the country, however, has created as many jobs in
recent years as the Washington metropolitan area. Between 2000 and
2005, the region added 359,000 new jobs, said Stephen S. Fuller,
director of the Center for Regional Analysis at George Mason
University, citing Labor Department statistics. That was 75,000 more
jobs than the nation’s No. 2 job engine, Miami.

"We’ve been
adding jobs faster than we’ve been able to add resident workers," he
said. "Had we been able to produce more housing, we could have added
more people." The Washington region is the eighth most-populous in the
United States, Fuller said, but is fourth in the number of total jobs,
trailing only New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.

The imbalance
probably means more congestion on Northern Virginia’s already-choked
roads. "The downside [to growth] is pretty clear," said Corey A.
Stewart (R-Occoquan), chairman of the Prince William Board of County
Supervisors, who was elected last year on a pledge to curb residential
development. "Increased tax bills. Crowded schools. Public services
stretched and overwhelmed."

I can’t argue that the job market in the DC area is great.  The problem is that housing is so expensive that all but the highest earners end up moving to the outer counties in order to afford a decent place to live.  Public transportation is expanding, but it can’t keep up with the pace of growth so that puts more people on the road and makes an already bad traffic situation almost impossible.

Now that things are getting ugly in places like Prince William and Loudoun the local politicians are starting to tighten up on development.  Unfortunately they didn’t listen to their constituents who were shouting for limits ten years ago.  Instead they gave the developers free reign and now they’ve got a mess.

The leaders here in the Piedmont Triad are pushing hard for more economic development, and in the wake of the exodus of all the textile and furniture business it’s hard to blame them.  I hope, though, that they take a long hard look at what happened in Northern Virginia and control growth from the beginning with a comprehensive growth plan.

I’ve always loved tilting at windmills.

First Pigpoop, Now an H-Bomb

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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.

Holy Hogcrap Batman

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Being in the land of Lexington BBQ and being an omnivore of great accomplishment I do love me some pork.  Unfortunately for my peace of mind I read this article from Rolling Stone about the hog processing industry, and Smithfield Foods in particular.  I don’t recommend reading it right before a meal.

The whole article is disturbing, but this excerpt hit home because the operation in question isn’t too far from where I live:

Smithfield’s expansion was unique in the history of the
industry: Between 1990 and 2005, it grew by more than 1,000
percent. In 1997 it was the nation’s seventh-largest pork producer;
by 1999 it was the largest. Smithfield now kills one of every four
pigs sold commercially in the United States. As Smithfield
expanded, it consolidated its operations, clustering millions of
fattening hogs around its slaughterhouses. Under Luter, the company
was turning into a great pollution machine: Smithfield was suddenly
producing unheard-of amounts of pig shit laced with drugs and
chemicals. According to the EPA, Smithfield’s largest
farm-slaughterhouse operation — in Tar Heel, North Carolina —
dumps more toxic waste into the nation’s water each year than all
but three other industrial facilities in America. (Emphasis mine).

Ain’t that nice?  There’s a whole lot more about Smithfield’s North Carolina operation in the article and it’s enough to make any normal person sick, if not by the descriptions of the pig crap then by the polluting practices of the industry.  Here’s another excerpt to get an idea of what you’re in for:

From Smithfield’s point of view, the problem with this lifestyle
is immunological. Taken together, the immobility, poisonous air and
terror of confinement badly damage the pigs’ immune systems. They
become susceptible to infection, and in such dense quarters
microbes or parasites or fungi, once established in one pig, will
rush spritelike through the whole population. Accordingly, factory
pigs are infused with a huge range of antibiotics and vaccines, and
are doused with insecticides. Without these compounds —
oxytetracycline, draxxin, ceftiofur, tiamulin — diseases would
likely kill them. Thus factory-farm pigs remain in a state of dying
until they’re slaughtered. When a pig nearly ready to be
slaughtered grows ill, workers sometimes shoot it up with as many
drugs as necessary to get it to the slaughterhouse under its own
power. As long as the pig remains ambulatory, it can be legally
killed and sold as meat.

The drugs Smithfield administers to its pigs, of course, exit
its hog houses in pig shit. Industrial pig waste also contains a
host of other toxic substances: ammonia, methane, hydrogen sulfide,
carbon monoxide, cyanide, phosphorous, nitrates and heavy metals.
In addition, the waste nurses more than 100 microbial pathogens
that can cause illness in humans, including salmonella,
cryptosporidium, streptocolli and girardia. Each gram of hog shit
can contain as much as 100 million fecal coliform bacteria.

Smithfield’s holding ponds — the company calls them lagoons —
cover as much as 120,000 square feet. The area around a single
slaughterhouse can contain hundreds of lagoons, some of which run
thirty feet deep. The liquid in them is not brown. The interactions
between the bacteria and blood and afterbirths and stillborn
piglets and urine and excrement and chemicals and drugs turn the
lagoons pink.

Even light rains can cause lagoons to overflow; major floods
have transformed entire counties into pig-shit bayous. To alleviate
swelling lagoons, workers sometimes pump the shit out of them and
spray the waste on surrounding fields, which results in what the
industry daintily refers to as "overapplication." This can turn
hundreds of acres — thousands of football fields — into shallow
mud puddles of pig shit. Tree branches drip with pig shit.

Some pig-farm lagoons have polyethylene liners, which can be
punctured by rocks in the ground, allowing shit to seep beneath the
liners and spread and ferment. Gases from the fermentation can
inflate the liner like a hot-air balloon and rise in an expanding,
accelerating bubble, forcing thousands of tons of feces out of the
lagoon in all directions.

and

Smithfield is not just a virtuosic polluter; it is also a
theatrical one. Its lagoons are historically prone to failure. In
North Carolina alone they have spilled, in a span of four years, 2
million gallons of shit into the Cape Fear River, 1.5 million
gallons into its Persimmon Branch, one million gallons into the
Trent River and 200,000 gallons into Turkey Creek. In Virginia,
Smithfield was fined $12.6 million in 1997 for 6,900 violations of
the Clean Water Act — the third-largest civil penalty ever levied
under the act by the EPA. It amounted to .035 percent of
Smithfield’s annual sales.

and

The biggest spill in the history of corporate hog farming
happened in 1995. The dike of a 120,000-square-foot lagoon owned by
a Smithfield competitor ruptured, releasing 25.8 million gallons of
effluvium into the headwaters of the New River in North Carolina.
It was the biggest environmental spill in United States history,
more than twice as big as the Exxon Valdez oil spill six years
earlier. The sludge was so toxic it burned your skin if you touched
it, and so dense it took almost two months to make its way sixteen
miles downstream to the ocean. From the headwaters to the sea,
every creature living in the river was killed. Fish died by the
millions.

It’s hard to conceive of a fish kill that size. The kill began
with turbulence in one small part of the water: fish writhing and
dying. Then it spread in patches along the entire length and
breadth of the river. In two hours, dead and dying fish were
mounded wherever the river’s contours slowed the current, and the
riverbanks were mostly dead fish. Within a day dead fish completely
covered the riverbanks, and between the floating and beached and
piled fish the water scintillated out of sight up and down the
river with billions of buoyant dead eyes and scales and white
bellies — more fish than the river seemed capable of holding. The
smell of rotting fish covered much of the county; the air above the
river was chaotic with scavenging birds. There were far more dead
fish than the birds could ever eat.

Spills aren’t the worst thing that can happen to toxic pig waste
lying exposed in fields and lagoons. Hurricanes are worse. In 1999,
Hurricane Floyd washed 120,000,000 gallons of unsheltered hog waste
into the Tar, Neuse, Roanoke, Pamlico, New and Cape Fear rivers.
Many of the pig-shit lagoons of eastern North Carolina were several
feet underwater. Satellite photographs show a dark brown tide
closing over the region’s waterways, converging on the
Albemarle-Pamlico Sound and feeding itself out to sea in a long,
well-defined channel. Very little freshwater marine life remained
behind. Tens of thousands of drowned pigs were strewn across the
land. Beaches located miles from Smithfield lagoons were slathered
in feces. A picture taken at the time shows a shark eating a dead
pig three miles off the North Carolina coast.

Reading this reminds me about the time in college I was assigned "The Jungle" as part of an English Lit course.  I couldn’t eat burgers for a while, that’s for sure.

BBQ anybody?