1.7 million chickens drown as NC rivers swollen by Florence
Michael Biesecker, Associated Press September 18, 2018
Chicken farm buildings are inundated with floodwater from Hurricane Florence near Trenton, N.C., Sunday, Sept. 16, 2018. (AP Photo/Steve Helber).
About 1.7 million chickens have been killed in flooding from Florence as rising North Carolina rivers swamped at least 60 farm buildings where the animals were being raised for market, according to a major poultry producer.
Sanderson Farms said Tuesday the losses occurred at independent farms that supply its poultry processing plants. The company said its facilities suffered no major damage, but supply disruptions and flooded roadways had caused shutdowns at some plants.
In addition, about 30 farms near Lumberton have been isolated by flood waters, hampering the delivery of feed to animals. The lack of food could cause additional birds to die if access isn’t restored quickly, the company said.
The N.C. Pork Council says some hogs also may have died when farms flooded, but that mortality figures are not yet available. The pork industry trade group says farmers have been working before and after the storm to move at-risk animals to higher ground. The industry lost about 2,800 hogs during flooding from Hurricane Matthew in 2016.
The Department of Environmental Quality said the earthen dam at one hog lagoon in Duplin County had breached, spilling its contents. Another 25 of the pits containing animal feces and urine have either suffered structural damage, had wastewater levels go over their tops from heavy rains or had been swamped by floodwaters. Large mounds of manure are also typically stored at poultry farms.
Even though the sun shown in parts of the state Tuesday, major flooding is continuing after Florence’s passage and is expected to worsen in some areas. Sixteen North Carolina rivers were at major flood stage Tuesday with an additional three forecast to peak by Thursday.
An environmental threat is also posed by human waste as low-lying municipal sewage plants flood. On Sunday, the Cape Fear Public Utility Authority reported that more than 5 million gallons of partially treated sewage had spilled into the Cape Fear River after power failed at its treatment plant.
The Environmental Protection Agency said Monday that 16 community water treatment facilities in North Carolina are unable to supply drinking water and that seven publicly owned sewage treatment works are non-operational due to the flooding.
Duke Energy is continuing cleanup operations Tuesday following a weekend breach at a coal ash landfill at its L.V. Sutton Power Station near Wilmington.
Duke spokeswoman Paige Sheehan said a full assessment of how much ash escaped from the waterlogged landfill is ongoing. The company initially estimated Saturday that about 2,000 cubic yards (1,530 cubic meters) of ash were displaced, enough to fill about 180 dump trucks.
The coal-fired Sutton plant was retired in 2013 and replaced with a new facility that burns natural gas. The company has been excavating millions of tons of leftover ash from old pits there and removing the waste to a new lined landfill constructed on the property. The gray ash left behind when coal is burned contains toxic heavy metals, including arsenic, lead and mercury.
Photos from the site provided to AP by Cape Fear River Watch, an environmental advocacy group, show cascades of gray-colored water spilling from at least two breaches at the landfill and flowing toward Sutton Lake, the plant’s former cooling pond which is now used for public recreation, including fishing and boating.
Sutton Lake drains into the Cape Fear River. Sheehan said Duke’s assessment is that there was minimal chance any contaminants from the spill had reached the river.
At a different power plant near Goldsboro, three old coal ash dumps capped with soil were inundated by the Neuse River. Duke said they had no indication those dumps at the H.F. Lee Power Plant were leaking ash into the river.
Duke’s handling of ash waste has faced intense scrutiny since a drainage pipe collapsed under a waste pit at an old plant in Eden in 2014, triggering a massive spill that coated 70 miles (110 kilometers) of the Dan River in gray sludge. The utility later agreed to plead guilty to nine Clean Water Act violations and pay $102 million in fines and restitution for illegally discharging pollution from ash dumps at five North Carolina power plants. It plans to close all its ash dumps by 2029.
In South Carolina, workers with electricity provider Santee Cooper erected a temporary dike in hopes of preventing flooding of an old coal ash dump at the demolished Grainger Generating Station near Conway. The dump is adjacent to the Waccamaw River, which is expected to crest at nearly 20 feet (6 meters) this weekend. That’s nine feet above flood stage and would set a new record height.
Michael Biesecker , Associated Press September 17, 2018
A hog farm is inundated with floodwaters from Hurricane Florence near Trenton, N.C., Sunday, Sept. 16, 2018. (AP Photo/Steve Helber).
Flooded rivers from Florence’s driving rains have begun to swamp coal ash dumps and low-lying hog farms, raising pollution concerns as the swollen waterways approach their crests Monday.
Duke Energy said the weekend collapse of a coal ash landfill at the mothballed L.V. Sutton Power Station near Wilmington, North Carolina, is an “on-going situation,” with an unknown amount of potentially contaminated storm water flowing into a nearby lake. At a different power plant near Goldsboro, three old coal ash dumps capped with soil were inundated by the Neuse River.
An Associated Press photographer who flew over eastern North Carolina’s Trent River on Sunday saw several flooded hog farms, their long metal buildings ringed by dark water. Such farms typically have large pits filled with hog urine and feces that can cause significant water contamination if breached. State regulators said they hadn’t received any reports of spills so far.
An AP analysis of location data from hog waste disposal permits shows at least 45 active North Carolina farms are located in 100-year and 500-year floodplains.
Federal forecasters predicted several rivers would crest at record or near-record levels by Monday, and high water could linger for days. Officials with the N.C. Park Council, and industry trade group, said farmers had prepared for the storm by lowering water levels in waste ponds and moving animals to higher ground.
At the closed Sutton plant, Duke spokeswoman Paige Sheehan said a full assessment of how much ash escaped from the water-slogged landfill can’t occur until the rain stops. She said there was no indication that any contaminants had reached the nearby Cape Fear River.
The company initially estimated Saturday that about 2,000 cubic yards (1,530 cubic meters) of ash were displaced, enough to fill about 180 dump trucks. Sheehan said the estimate could be revised later.
The coal-fired Sutton plant was retired in 2013 and the company has been excavating millions of tons of ash from old waste pits and removing it to safer lined landfills constructed on the property. The gray ash left behind when coal is burned contains toxic heavy metals, including arsenic, lead and mercury.
Sheehan also said three inactive ash basins at the H.F. Lee Power Station near Goldsboro were under water.
State environmental regulators said they’ve been unable to inspect the Sutton landfill because of flooding.
Duke’s handling of ash waste has faced intense scrutiny since a drainage pipe collapsed under a waste pit at an old plant in Eden in 2014, triggering a massive spill that coated 70 miles (110 kilometers) of the Dan River in gray sludge. The utility later agreed to plead guilty to nine Clean Water Act violations and pay $102 million in fines and restitution for illegally discharging pollution from ash dumps at five North Carolina power plants. It plans to close all its ash dumps by 2029.
Environmentalists have warned for decades that Duke’s coal ash ponds were vulnerable to severe storms, potentially threatening drinking water supplies and public safety.
“Disposing of coal ash close to waterways is hazardous, and Duke Energy compounds the problem by leaving most of its ash in primitive unlined pits filled with water,” said Frank Holleman, a senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center.
He said he hoped “Duke Energy will commit itself to removing its ash from all its unlined waterfront pits and, if it refuses, that the state of North Carolina will require it to remove the ash from these unlined pits.”
Associated Press data journalist Angeliki Kastanis is in Los Angeles and writer Gary D. Robertson contributed from Raleigh.
Flooding from Hurricane Florence Threatens to Overwhelm Manure Lagoons
By Charles Bethea September 15, 2018
Young hogs at an industrial animal-feeding operation in North Carolina. As Hurricane Florence approached, many farmers near the facilities were expected to evacuate, leaving the animals behind. Photograph by Gerry Broome / AP.
On any given day, there are about six million hogs in North Carolina. The vast majority of them are confined in buildings, in what are known as concentrated animal-feeding operations. According to research conducted by Mark Sobsey, a professor of environmental sciences and engineering at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, farmed hogs, which can weigh in excess of two hundred and fifty pounds, create as much as ten times the fecal waste produced by humans. (The hog industry disputes Sobsey’s conclusion.) Other environmental groups say that hogs only create five times as much shit. Regardless, eastern North Carolina, which is being drenched to unprecedented levels by Hurricane Florence this week, is “literally the cesspool of the United States,” Rick Dove, a senior adviser to the Waterkeeper Alliance, a nonprofit environmental group, told me. “You can’t describe it any other way. And flooding from this hurricane is making it even more obvious.”
That waste is collected in what are somewhat euphemistically called lagoons. The hogs defecate on slatted floors inside their confinement buildings and push their waste through the slats into a system that empties into an outdoor cesspool. “It’s an uncovered, open-air pit lined only with clay,” Dove said. There are about four thousand lagoons across the state, many near the coast. Dove lives near New Bern, North Carolina, on a bluff safely above the currently rising Neuse River. “The waste bakes in the hot summer sun every year,” he said. “It smells terrible. And when the lagoon fills up, they suck it out and spray it on fields, ostensibly as fertilizer. Though I’d debate that.” He added, “They’re just trying to lower that lagoon.”
Dove regularly takes airplane tours of hog farms in eastern North Carolina, he told me, “because it’s the easiest way to document waste-related violations.” From noon to 4 p.m. on Wednesday, not long before Florence arrived on the North Carolina coast, Dove was able to take a final observational flight. “I saw sludge above the surface of the lagoons and stuff growing on the sludge,” he said. He estimated that nearly one in ten farms had their waste sprayers on, distributing the hog excrement across soon-to-be flooded land. Other farms seemed poised to have their lagoons breach or overflow.
Even under normal conditions, the farms’ odor penetrates the plane, three thousand feet above. “We can smell the waste,” Dove told me. “It’s been described in court proceedings as similar to the odor of dead bodies. It’s the worst smell in the world. It clings to your clothes. It burns your eyes, burns your nose and even your lips. And these swine lagoons are built right in neighborhoods.” Often, Dove said, the sprayed overflow waste ends up on or near cars and homes. (In May, five hundred neighbors of North Carolina hog farms, owned by Murphy-Brown, a subsidiary of Smithfield Foods, won a fifty-million-dollar judgment against the corporation. Its hog-waste-management practices, the neighbors argued, adversely affected their quality of life. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue told reporters that he considered the verdict “despicable.”)
As the storm approached, most of the farmers who live near the facilities probably evacuated, Dove told me, leaving the animals behind. “The water will go over the confinement buildings,” he said. “Most of those animals are gonna drown.” As flooding worsens on the North Carolina coast, no one I could reach has been able to observe firsthand what’s happening to the hogs—or to the hog-waste lagoons. Reconnaissance flights have been cancelled until weather conditions improve. But area environmentalists, whom I reached on Friday and Saturday, are deeply concerned about the situation.
On Saturday morning, Matt Butler, the program director with Sound Rivers, was able to drive around parts of the Tar-Pamlico River Basin, which his group oversees. The basin’s southern edge is located about a hundred miles north of Wilmington. “The thirty or so farms we keep track of have not yet experienced inundation, as of this morning,” he told me. “But some were spraying waste ahead of the storm.” Butler agreed that the real effects of Florence on the hog farms will be seen from the air. “We have a very high concern that we’ll see lagoons and farms flooded further south, distributing waste all over the place,” he said.
Kemp Burdette, the Cape Fear Riverkeeper, was born and raised in Wilmington. He now lives about twenty miles northwest, on the Black River, a flat body of water in a cypress swamp. “The human costs will be significant,” Burdette told me. “I mean, my house will probably be flooded. But the wider environmental costs will be enormous as well.” He, too, was most concerned about the flooding of factory farms. “The Black River, Northeast Cape Fear River, and the main stem of the Cape Fear River flow through three of the most swine-farm-concentrated counties, which make up the most swine-farming-dense watershed on earth,” he said. “There’s plenty of poultry farms, too.” He added, “It’s looking like a worst-case scenario here, with those rivers cresting to historically high levels.”
Burdette spent Thursday and Friday trying to save his home, which sits on stilts. “The river has started to come up,” he told me Friday night. “My girlfriend and I took a load of our most valuable stuff—pictures, kids’ art, Christmas stuff, that kind of thing—to my office, in Wilmington. Then we took our boat, which we’ll need in a few days to get out to the house, into town, too, so it wouldn’t get stranded out here.” They brought everything else up to the second floor of the home and—since flooding from Hurricane Matthew, in 2016, breached that floor—put it all on three-foot saw horses.“We just took bucket baths in the tub,” Burdette said. “We’re cooking dinner now. And we’re getting ready to lay down on our army cots and go to sleep here soon. The river is rising, though, so I’m gonna set my alarm to get up several times tonight to make sure it’s not rising too fast.”
Tom Butler (no relation to Matt) runs a factory farm a hundred and ten miles northwest of Wilmington, with about eight thousand hogs. “It’s a medium-sized farm,” he told me on Saturday afternoon. “We have about a hundred thousand contract hogs in my county, while the next county over, Sampson, has two million. I’ve had a concentrated animal-feeding operation here for twenty-three years. I’m familiar with bad weather and lagoons.” So far, he’s had about eight or nine inches of rain fall on his farm. But he’s taken precautions that, he says, most other hog farmers don’t. “I’m an advocate for better waste management,” he said, “and have been for ten years. The industry doesn’t like me very much. We have high-density-plastic covers for our lagoons—only about seven or eight farms out of two thousand in North Carolina do that—which excludes the rainwater and prevents inundation or whatever. As far as hog protection, we just lower the curtains to keep off the wind. We cut off the feeders so the feed won’t get wet. We stay with that mode until the wind and rain goes by.”
Butler went on, “We have no idea what’s gonna happen with the residual flooding from this storm. Most folks are just praying, as far as controlling the lagoon problem. Even if a grower had his lagoons pumped down to the regulatory amount of nineteen inches, it would still overflow when you have twenty to thirty inches of rain predicted. That amount of rain is a real problem. Fifteen inches many can get by with. Twenty inches is a real problem.”
Florence’s rains: Coal ash landfill collapses in Carolinas’
Michael Biesecker, Associated Press September 16, 2018
In this June 23, 2014 file photo, the dried-up bed of an inactive coal ash pond is seen at Duke Energy’s Sutton plant in Wilmington, N.C. Duke Energy says heavy rains from Florence have caused a slope to collapse at a coal ash landfill at a closed power station near the North Carolina coast.
Duke spokeswoman Paige Sheehan said Saturday night, Sept. 15, 2018, that about 2,000 cubic yards of ash have been displaced at the L. V. Sutton Power Station outside Wilmington. (Mike Spencer/The Star-News via AP)
Heavy rains from Florence caused a slope to collapse at a coal ash landfill at a closed power station near the North Carolina coast, Duke Energy says.
Duke spokeswoman Paige Sheehan said late Saturday about 2,000 cubic yards (1,530 cubic meters) of ash were displaced at the L. V. Sutton Power Station outside Wilmington and that contaminated runoff likely flowed into the plant’s cooling pond.
The company has not yet determined whether the weir that drains the lake was open or if contamination may have flowed into the Cape Fear River. That’s roughly enough ash to fill 180 dump trucks.
Florence slammed into the North Carolina coast as a large hurricane Friday, dumping nearly three feet (1 meter) of rain and swelling the region’s rivers. The resulting flooding forced swift-water rescues and left several people dead.
Sheehan said the company had reported the incident to state and federal regulators “out of an abundance of caution.”
The coal-fired Sutton plant was retired in 2013 and the company has been excavating millions of tons of ash from old waste pits and removing it to safer lined landfills constructed on the property. The gray ash left behind when coal is burned contains toxic heavy metals, including arsenic, lead and mercury.
Duke has been under intense scrutiny for the handling of its coal ash since a drainage pipe collapsed under a waste pit at an old plant in Eden in 2014, triggering a massive spill that coated 70 miles (110 kilometers) of the Dan River in gray sludge.
In a subsequent settlement with federal regulators, Duke agreed to plead guilty to nine Clean Water Act violations and pay $102 million in fines and restitution for illegally discharging pollution from coal-ash dumps at five North Carolina power plants. The company is in the process of closing all of its coal ash dumps by 2029.
Spokeswoman Megan S. Thorpe at the state’s Department of Environmental Quality said state regulators will conduct a thorough inspection of the site as soon as safely possible.
“DEQ has been closely monitoring all coal ash impoundments that could be vulnerable in this record breaking rain event,” Thorpe said. She added that the department, after assessing the damage, will “hold the utility accountable for implementing the solution that ensures the protection of public health and the environment.”
There are at least two other coal-fired Duke plants in North Carolina that are likely to affected by the storm.
The H.F. Lee Power Station near Goldsboro has three inactive ash basins that flooded during Hurricane Matthew in 2016, exposing a small amount of coal ash that may have flowed into the nearby Neuse River. The old waste pits are capped with soil and vegetation intended to help prevent erosion of the toxic ash beneath.
The Neuse is expected to crest at more than nine feet (3 meters) above flood stage Monday and Sheehan said the company expects the same ash basins are likely to be inundated again.
At the W. H. Weatherspoon Power Station near Lumberton, Sheehan said it had already rained more than 30 inches (75 centimeters) by Saturday evening, causing a nearby swamp to overflow into the plants cooling pond. The Lumber River is expected to crest at more than 11 feet (3.3 meters) above flood stage Sunday, which would put the floodwaters near the top of the earthen dike containing the plant’s coal ash dump.
Environmentalists have been warning for decades that Duke’s coal ash ponds were vulnerable to severe storms and pose a threat to drinking water supplies and public safety.
“Disposing of coal ash close to waterways is hazardous, and Duke Energy compounds the problem by leaving most of its ash in primitive unlined pits filled with water,” said Frank Holleman, a senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center who has battled the company in court.
“In this instance, it appears that Duke Energy has not done enough to ensure that its new Wilmington landfill safely stores coal ash. After this storm, we hope that Duke Energy will commit itself to removing its ash from all its unlined waterfront pits and, if it refuses, that the state of North Carolina will require it to remove the ash from these unlined pits.”
Democrats Call To Delay Kavanaugh Vote After His Accuser Goes Public
Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Sept. 6, 2018. Alex Wong/Getty Images
Top Senate Democrats said Sunday that the Senate should delay further action on confirming Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh until newly revealed allegations of sexual assault from 35 years ago are investigated by the FBI.
The vote was scheduled for this week but Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, called for the delay shortly after The Washington Postpublished a story naming the woman who says that Kavanaugh tried to sexually assault her when they were both teenagers.
The woman, Christine Blasey Ford, spoke to the Post on the record and confirmed details that had previously been reported in other outlets, including The New Yorker.
Ford said that one night in the 1980s, when she was in high school, a drunken Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed, attempted to pull off her clothing and covered her mouth as she tried to scream. She was able to flee after Kavanaugh’s friend, Mark Judge, jumped on them.
“I thought he might inadvertently kill me,” Ford told the Post. “He was trying to attack me and remove my clothing.”
At first, she vowed to never speak of the incident, she said. But the trauma eventually drove her to seek therapy. She brought the incident up at a couples therapy session in 2012, she said.
“I categorically and unequivocally deny this allegation. I did not do this back in high school or at any time,” said Kavanaugh in a statement issued by the White House last week when the allegations began to surface.
But his words have not stemmed a wave of Democrats who are calling for his nomination to be delayed.
“I support Mrs. Ford’s decision to share her story, and now that she has, it is in the hands of the FBI to conduct an investigation,” Feinstein said in a statement. “This should happen before the Senate moves forward on this nominee.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) called on Grassley to postpone the vote “until, at a very minimum, these serious and credible allegations are thoroughly investigated.” He added, “To railroad a vote now would be an insult to the women of America and the integrity of the Supreme Court.”
Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) echoed their messages on Twitter, saying, “The Senate has a constitutional responsibility to scrutinize SCOTUS nominees. A vote on Kavanaugh’s nomination must be delayed until there is a thorough investigation.”
On Friday, after the contents of the letter were first reported, an FBI official said the agency had not opened a criminal investigation.
A spokesman for Sen. Chuck Grassley, the Republican chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the allegations should have been brought up earlier. Their timing and nature “raises a lot of questions about Democrats’ tactics and motives to bring this to the rest of the committee’s attention only now rather than during these many steps along the way.”
During the judge’s hearing, Sen. Mazie Hirono (D.-Hawaii) asked Kavanaugh if he had ever made unwanted sexual advances, verbally or physically since becoming a legal adult. Kavanaugh replied “no” to her questions. The allegations made against Kavanaugh would have taken place while he was still a minor.
“It took a lot of courage for Christine Blasey Ford to come forward to share her story of sexual assault by Brett Kavanaugh,” Hirono said in a statement on Sunday. “This development is yet another reason not to rush Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination.”
Before Ford broke her silence, Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) said Sunday on Fox that Kavanaugh’s nomination process as an “intergalactic freak show” and that “I don’t know what our Democratic friends expect us to do” about the sexual assault allegation because of its secrecy. He predicted that every Republican would vote for Kavanaugh.
The Post reported that Ford, now a 51-year-old research psychologist and professor, contacted the paper in early July — after Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his intention to retire and Kavanaugh was shortlisted as his potential replacement.
On the advice of civil rights lawyer Debra Katz, who specializes in sexual harassment cases, she even took a polygraph test which reportedly demonstrated that her allegations were accurate. There are also therapist’s notes which describe the incident.
She said, “Now I feel like my civic responsibility is outweighing my anguish and terror about retaliation.”
Brett Kavanaugh Accuser Goes Public: ‘I Thought He Might Inadvertently Kill Me’
Hayley Miller, HuffPost September 16, 2018
The woman who accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault.
The woman who accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault in a confidential letter to members of Congress has come forward to tell her story.
Christine Blasey Ford, a professor at Palo Alto University in California, told The Washington Post that she had feared Kavanaugh “might inadvertently kill” her as he held her down and groped her while they were both high school students around 1982.
Ford alleges another teenager watched as a drunken Kavanaugh attempted to remove her clothing at a gathering outside Washington in suburban Maryland. She tried to scream, but Kavanaugh covered her mouth to silence her, she told the Post. She said she escaped after Kavanaugh’s friend entered the room and jumped on top of both of them.
“I think it derailed me substantially for four or five years,” Ford told the Post of the alleged assault. She described the incident as a “rape attempt” during a therapy session in 2012, according to her therapist’s notes obtained by the Post.
Kavanaugh, 53, has denied any wrongdoing.
“I categorically and unequivocally deny this allegation,” Kavanaugh said in a statement last week when news of the letter first surfaced. “I did not do this back in high school or at any time.”
Ford had been requesting anonymity, but she decided to identify herself in the Post article published early Sunday afternoon.
Ford sent the letter to Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) during the summer, after Kavanaugh was nominated for the high court vacancy by President Donald Trump, to share her concerns about him.
After weeks of media speculation, Feinstein, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee that will decide whether to advance Kavanaugh’s nomination to the full Senate, confirmed the existence of the letter on Thursday. She also said she referred the matter to the FBI.
Ford told the Post she hadn’t wanted to identify herself publicly, but after details of her letter began to leak, she decided she wanted to be the one to tell her story.
The Judiciary Committee vote on Kavanaugh is scheduled for Thursday, but Feinstein said the panel should wait to vote on Kavanaugh’s confirmation until the FBI has conducted its review into the matter.
“I support Mrs. Ford’s decision to share her story, and now that she has, it is in the hands of the FBI to conduct an investigation,” Feinstein said in a statement Sunday. “This should happen before the Senate moves forward on this nominee.”
Taylor Foy, a spokeswoman for Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), on Sunday termed “disturbing” the timing of “uncorroborated allegations from more than 35 years ago, during high school.”
Foy said that if Feinstein and other committee Democrats “took this claim seriously, they should have brought it to the full committee’s attention much earlier.” She also called on Feinstein to release the letter she received from Ford in July “so that everyone can know what she’s known for weeks.”
Several other Democratic lawmakers, including Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), on Sunday echoed Feinstein’s call for a delayed vote on Kavanaugh.
Grassley “must postpone the vote until, at a very minimum, these serious and credible allegations are thoroughly investigated,” Schumer said in a statement.
The White House reiterated its support for Kavanaugh, a federal appellate court judge, in the wake of the latest development.
“We are standing with Judge Kavanaugh’s denial,” White House principal deputy press secretary Raj Shah said in a statement to Fox News on Sunday.
This story has been updated with comment from Feinstein and Schumer. Igor Bobic contributed reporting.
Homeland Security Shifted $10 Million From FEMA For Immigrant Crackdown, Senator Says
Nick Visser, HuffPost September 12, 2018
Homeland Security shifted $10 million from FEMA for crackdown on immigration
The Trump administration transferred nearly $10 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency earlier this year to fund immigrant detention and deportation efforts, according to a document released Tuesday by Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore).
The lawmaker first shared the documents with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, saying that the Department of Homeland Security requested the money “just as hurricane season [was] starting” and as it was attempting to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the midst of its new “zero tolerance” immigration policy. The controversial crackdown resulted in the separation of thousands of migrant children from their parents, hundreds of whom have yet to be reunited.
“This is a scandal. At the start of hurricane season — when American citizens in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands are still suffering from FEMA’s inadequate recovery efforts — the administration transferred millions of dollars away from FEMA,” Merkley said in a statement to HuffPost. “And for what? To implement their profoundly misguided ‘zero tolerance’ policy. It wasn’t enough to rip thousands of children out of the arms of their parents — the administration chose to partly pay for this horrific program by taking away from the ability to respond to damage from this year’s upcoming and potentially devastating hurricane season.”
The document’s release comes just days before Hurricane Florence, a powerful Category 4 storm, is expected to make landfall in the Carolinas’. Millions of people are currently evacuating or hunkering down.
“$10 million comes out of FEMA when we’re facing a hurricane season knowing what’s happened last year,” Merkley told Maddow on Tuesday. “And look what we’ve had since, a hurricane just barely miss Hawaii. … Now we have this hurricane, Florence, bearing down on the Carolinas.”
DHS spokesman Tyler Houlton late Tuesday called the senator’s appearance a “sorry attempt to push a false agenda,” saying the administration was instead “focused on assisting millions on the East Coast facing a catastrophic disaster.”
“The money in question — transferred to ICE from FEMA’s routine operating expenses — could not have been used for hurricane response due to appropriation limitations,” Houlton wrote on Twitter. “DHS/FEMA stand fiscally and operationally ready to support current and future response and recovery needs.”
The document released by Merkley, which was supplied to HuffPost, states that more than $2.3 million from a total of about $9.8 million had been diverted from FEMA’s “response and recovery” budget. Other funding was transferred from regional operations, mitigation efforts, preparedness and protection, and mission support budgets.
The amount transferred is less than 1 percent of FEMA’s budget for the fiscal year, according to the document, which also notes that the agency’s “mission impact” would be minimized as FEMA would only be required to “curtail training, travel, public engagement sessions, IT security support and infrastructure maintenance, and IT investments.”
The Department of Homeland Security has the authority to move a limited amount of money around within its budget. In the past, Congress had limited DHS from shuffling more than $5 million from one approved program to another through the process known as “reprogramming.”
A coalition of human rights groups penned a letter on June 27 asking the Senate Committee on Appropriations to oppose attempts by DHS to up the amount of funding for immigrant detention, accusing the department of “dramatically overspending its appropriated budget in ways both morally reprehensible and fiscally irresponsible.”
The $10 million of additional funds that DHS aims to use to expand immigrant detention amounts to less than 1 percent of the ICE budget for locking up immigrants, which tops $1.4 billion.
Trump administration rushes to lease federal lands
Alexander Nazaryan September 11, 2018
White House rushes to lease federal lands
Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke and Donald Trump. (Photo illustration: Yahoo News, photos: AP (2), Helen H. Richardson/Denver Post via Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — The Department of Interior is quietly preparing to offer hundreds of thousands of acres of public land for leasing to energy companies, a move critics have charged is being undertaken with minimal public input and little consideration for ecological and cultural preservation.
According to data compiled by environmental groups, the Bureau of Land Management will put 2.9 million acres up for potential leasing in the next four months. Because the land in question — in states including New Mexico, Colorado and Arizona — lacks designation as a national park or monument, it can be used for commercial purposes such as mining for minerals and drilling for oil and gas. Supporters say that bolstering the extractive industries will ensure energy independence for the United States, though shifting energy preferences and falling oil prices appear to undermine that assertion.
Some 250 million acres of land are under the bureau’s control nationwide, with the overwhelming majority of the parcels concentrated in a dozen Western states, which sometimes chafe at what they regard as Washington’s inept oversight. That tension was most dramatically on display in 2014, when federal agents engaged in an armed standoff with the family of Cliven Bundy, a Nevada rancher with extreme right-wing views. The dispute arose from Bundy’s insistence on allowing his cattle to graze on public lands, a practice that saw him accrue some $1 million in fines, which he refused to pay.
The Bureau of Land Management is part of the Department of the Interior, which is today headed by Ryan Zinke, a Montana native who has styled himself a rugged conservationist, even as he maintains close ties to private enterprise. Many of his closest advisers at Interior have ties to the oil and gas industry, either as lobbyists or executives. His top deputy, for example, is David L. Bernhardt, a veteran Republican operative who has also lobbied on behalf of California agribusiness.
Protesters on horseback ride on the hills above a rally site in Bunkerville, Nev., April 12, 2014. (Photo: Jim Urquhart/Reuters).
During his confirmation hearing, Zinke said that he was “absolutely against transfer and sale of public lands.” But that claim would not prevent him from issuing leases for oil and gas companies, as the land would technically remain under public control, even as it was being used for private gain. Such leases are issued for 10 years at exceedingly favorable terms, often for the minimum bid of $2 per acre at a competitive sale, after which they are available for two years at the even-more-discounted price of $1.50 per acre if they do not sell at that first sale.
Leasing land was a common practice before Trump. What’s different now, detractors say, is that the Bureau of Land Management is moving with uncommon speed to make improper determinations without allowing public to comment. That has led, these critics say, to widespread damage to the environment of the American West.
Gas wells and facilities at a Jonah Energy field, outside Pinedale, Wyo. (Photo: Melanie Stetson Freeman/Christian Science Monitor via Getty Images)
“We can’t just get it back,” says Nada Culver, a leader in the Wilderness Society’s land-use division. “Mistakes are made when you’re rushing.”
The Obama administration offered plenty of land to energy and mineral prospectors, but it did so in far more considered fashion. In 2016, the Obama administration put 1.9 million acres up for leasing, down from a high of 6.1 million acres offered in 2012. In its first year, the Trump administration offered 11.9 acres, the vast majority of them in Alaska. In the end, only 792,000 acres were leased, which represented just 7 percent of the offerings. In 2016, conversely, the Obama administration offered a much smaller total number of acres (1.9 million), but sold a far greater share: 47 percent, or 921,240. That suggests the Obama administration was more judicious in determining lands that would be desirable to industry.
Those numbers, however, do not tell the full story. Less important than the amount of land offered, conservationists say, is where those parcels are located, as well as their significance as either natural resources or cultural landmarks. In this, too, the Obama administration appears to have been significantly more successful than its successor. In 2012, for example, only 17 percent of the parcels offered by the Obama administration were “protested” by the public (those figures are for fiscal years, where as the compilation of acres offered is for calendar years; the two correlate closely, if not exactly). Conversely, of the parcels offered in 2017, a full 88 percent were contested, suggesting the Trump administration has been largely indiscriminate in the land it is offering.
An even higher percentage of lands could be contested this year, given how close they are to protected areas in some of the country’s most rugged, cherished regions. The greatest share of offerings are in Wyoming, where about 1.1 million acres are being offered for lease. There were also 721,705 acres offered in Nevada, 329,826 in Utah and 230,944 in Colorado, along with smaller parcels in New Mexico, Montana and Arizona. Some of these are near national monuments and national parks, including Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona, Canyonlands National Park in Utah and Dinosaur National Monument in Colorado.
Many of the lands also represent habitat of the sage grouse, a bird whose native habitat is the high desert of the West. The sage grouse’s numbers have been drastically diminished by commercial and residential development.
Sage grouse on a lake outside Walden, Colo. (Photo: David Zalubowski/AP)
President Obama considered protecting the grouse under the Endangered Species Act. Similar protection for the spotted owl in 1990 had laid waste to many a logger’s plans. Instead, in 2015, his Interior Department struck a deal with Western states. The sage grouse remained off the endangered species list, but there were 98 separate plans across the region to protect the bird —and, just as importantly, the landscape it lived on.
Zinke ordered those plans reviewed in the fall of 2018, indicating that he was preparing to offer some of the land set aside for sage grouse to energy or mineral-extraction companies. It’s unlikely that Zinke had personal animosity towards the bird. Rather, the sage grouse stands in the way of greater development of open lands across the West.
Aware that leasing land across the West could prove highly unpopular, the bureau canceled a 30-day comment period on any proposed lease, and the time to appeal a proposed lease already in the works was reduced to a mere 10 days. During the Obama administration, the total time for both comment and appeal had been 60 days.
“Were operating under a new guidance that has radically cut out opportunities for public input,” says Culver of the Wilderness Society.
Not only that, but Interior officials who worked in parks and national monuments were pressured to make land available for leasing, even when it was clear that studding that land with oil derricks and mining equipment would destroy the landscape and drive away the millions of tourists, both foreign and domestic, who came to see it each year.
“Why in the world, for a short-term gain, would you jeopardize those places by doing something stupid?” wonders Walt Dabney, who served as a park ranger for many decades and is now retired and living in Utah. He says that Moab, Utah, where he lives, is full of tourists and that French and Mandarin are commonly heard in local stores. The tourists bring millions to the local economy, and they “don’t boom-bust like the oil and gas business.”
Energy-related development will drive them away, according to Dabney, who says he’s not against energy. He is only against doing things quickly, and without consideration.
Among those challenging the Bureau of Land Management lease offerings is Conservatives for Responsible Stewardship, a group whose members lean red — and green. Its president, David Jenkins, has called for 117,000 acres across five states to be set aside by Interior. “It certainly makes no sense to lock up these important public resources,” Jenkins said, since the “oil and gas industry has shown no interest in them,” a reference to the tepid response to 2017’s offerings. The fear, of course, is that the non-Alaska offerings of 2018 will be more enthusiastically received.
Legislators and conservationists have had little recourse but to prepare for the next round of BLM offerings. The two Democratic U.S. Senators from New Mexico, Tom Udall and Martin Heinrich, have introduced legislation that would prevent leasing within 10 miles of of the Chaco Culture National Historical Park. Previous administration had informally honored such a buffer; the Trump administration does not.
Udall, ranking member on the Senate Appropriations subcommittee overseeing the Department of the Interior’s budget, told Yahoo News, “It is the height of folly to take this ‘drill everywhere all the time’ approach at a time when domestic production from public lands is already at near record levels and U.S. action on climate change is stalling. The Trump administration’s corporate giveaways won’t lead to more energy security — they’ll just lead to more litigation, since the communities and tribes were not consulted. The American people have a right to comment on the management of their lands, and they will fight back against attempts to exploit these special places that belong to all of us.
At the Utah State Capitol, protesters demonstrate against President Trump’s plan to shrink protected areas across the country. (Photo: Michael Nigro/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)
The Department of Interior says such concerns are unfounded. “Congress specifically requires regular lease opportunities for energy and mineral production on federal lands,” department spokesperson Heather Swift told Yahoo News. “President Trump promised the American people that he would restore the balance of multiple use of federal lands, make America energy dominant, and generate economic growth. Federal lands play a huge part of that.”
The leasing of public lands represents “real money that will go to state governments for education, roads and public safety,” she added.
But because the funds from leased lands are shared between states and the federal government, and because the Trump administration has so far struggled to lease lands, those proceeds are not likely to be especially great. For example, of the 900 lots in Alaska offered by the Department of Interior in 2017, only seven found a leasor.
In all, Alaska received nearly $580,000. That is about a fifth of what the American taxpayer pays for each of Trump’s trips to Mar-a-Lago.
Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke and Donald Trump. (Photo illustration: Yahoo News, photos: AP (2), Helen H. Richardson/Denver Post via Getty Images)
