
Navassa: Cleaning Up a Century of Pollution
It took decades, but a plan to clean up the legacy left by an old creosote plant is finally beginning to take shape.
It took decades, but a plan to clean up the legacy left by an old creosote plant is finally beginning to take shape.
A black industrial town in an agricultural and tourist county, Navassa is the “poster child” for environmental justice issues, says an advocate.
CRO spends the next three days in Navassa, a predominantly black town in Brunswick County that has been the site of a century of industrial pollution. Today, we relive some of that history and outline the plan for the cleanup.
Town officials hoping to build terminal groins say they don’t plan on taking private property for the needed easements. Eminent domain is politically unpopular and rarely used in North Carolina.
Communities proposing terminal groins may have to get the permission of property owners to build these controversial structures. What happens if they say no? We explore possible answers in this Special Report.
The second part of our series on using air guns to survey for undersea oil and natural gas focuses on the possible effects on marine mammals, fish and commercial and recreation fishermen.
We spend the next two days exploring the proposed benefits and possible problems with using air guns to explore for oil and natural gas off the N.C. coast. Today, the pros.
In most cases, permits for bulkheads are pretty easy to come by in North Carolina. Federal and state regulators approve most with little review. Permits for living shorelines projects, however, can take months. That may be changing.
Research has shown that living shorelines can better withstand storms and require less maintenance than bulkheads. They can also be about as expensive to build.
In this the first of three parts, we explore the building evidence that more natural methods of controlling erosion called living shorelines are better for the environment and perhaps lighter on property owners’ pocketbooks than bulkheads.
In the last of our three-part series, we look at the proposed Titan America cement plant near Wilmington and its potential threat to the area’s groundwater supply.
A number of recent and ongoing studies are helping to provide better understanding of the region’s groundwater resources, including a federal effort to create a national water census.