After years of neglect, including a lack of investment from state governments that triggered a federal civil rights investigation, residents of rural Black Belt communities are getting help for a sewer and water problem that often resulted in raw waste flooding from household toilets straight into yards.
The federal Environmental Protection Agency announced this week that residents in 150 rural communities, including several mostly-Black enclaves in Alabama and Mississippi, will get federal funds to create or upgrade sewers as well as drainage and septic systems.
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The announcement, part of the Biden-Harris administration’s Closing the Water Access Gap initiative, follows a successful pilot program launched in Lowndes County, Alabama — a majority-Black, low-income community where residents lacked access to the kind of municipal water infrastructure that most people take for granted.
Radhika Fox, the EPA’s assistant administrator for water, said in a statement that the initiative will bring water and sewer access to communities from McDowell County, W. Virginia, to the San Carlos Apache Tribe in Arizona. “In expanding the program to 150 additional communities, we are working to restore dignity and opportunity to underserved communities nationwide,” she said.
The lack of equitable access to water and sewer systems has been a critical issue in the Black Belt, a crescent of rural, majority-Black communities stretching from eastern Texas to southern Virginia.
According to one study, some 90% of septic systems in the Black Belt either do not function well or are outright failing. And when septic systems fail, people who can’t afford the thousands of dollars to replace them often resort to “straight piping”: getting rid of waste through a length of PVC pipe connected from the bathroom toilet straight into the backyard.
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In that method, untreated waste, with harmful pathogens like E. coli bacteria, spreads in the open grass, near where kids might play and flowers might grow.
The heavy clay soil in the region, which made it a cotton-growing powerhouse before the Civil War and a Black population center since emancipation — can’t absorb the waste, compounding the problem. The standing pools of waste attract flies and mosquitoes that carry infectious diseases like hookworm and yellow fever.
The wastewater problems are exacerbated by climate change. During heavy rains, the makeshift septic systems often back up into houses.
Catherine Coleman Flowers, an activist from Lowndes County, brought the issue to national attention in 2020 when, she wrote the book “Waste: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret.”
Flowers, along with the Southern Poverty Law Center, sued the Alabama EPA, alleging that it was “nearly impossible” for people in communities like hers to get funding from the state’s Clean Water State Revolving Fund.
The ensuing Department of Justice investigation found that the state and Lowndes County’s health departments discriminated against Black residents in “a consistent pattern of inaction and/or neglect concerning the health risks associated with raw sewage.”
As part of an agreement between the DOJ and Alabama officials, the state no longer fines residents who resort to straight-piping their waste, which is illegal despite being very common. Alabama also agreed not to file liens to push homeowners into compliance on sewage issues.
Closing the wastewater gap in the Black Belt will likely vary from county to county and town to town. The EPA program has helped the 11 pilot program communities draft “community solution plans” that will be finalized this spring, followed by building out new wastewater management systems that can finally address this decades-long problem.