Ep. 06: The Lagoon

The story of what concentrated animal feeding operations—CAFOs—do to the people who live beside, downstream, and downwind of them | In Kewaunee County, Wisconsin, the water coming out of the tap turned the color of rust. In Bladen County, North Carolina, the air grew so thick with gases from hog waste lagoons that families couldn't sit on their own porches. In the Lower Yakima Valley in Washington State, the water looked clean. It wasn't. Sixty percent of the wells nearest the dairy operations that had been running there for decades exceeded the federal safety standard for nitrate.None of these communities were the victims of an accident. The permits were followed. The lagoons worked as designed. The waste went exactly where the system allowed it to go.This story is told from three states, across five decades, through the people who got sick, the scientists who proved it, the lawyers who fought it, and the family that built one of the operations at the center of it all. It's a story about a regulatory system that was never designed to protect the communities it was supposed to serve, and about the people fighting back.