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<h1 class="articleOpinion-title">Filthy water and shoddy sewers
plague poor Black Belt counties</h1>
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<div class="articleOpinion-inner articleOpinion-inner--bottom">
<h2 class="articleOpinion-standfirst article-standfirst">Overflow
of raw sewage poses serious health risks, including return of
diseases believed extinct in the US</h2>
<div class="articleOpinion-dateByline article-dateByline">
<div class="articleOpinion-dateTime article-dateTime"> <span
class="date">June 3, 2015</span> <span class="time">5:00AM
ET</span> </div>
<div class="articleOpinion-containerByline"> <span
class="articleOpinion-byline"> by <a
href="http://america.aljazeera.com/profiles/c/ashley-cleek.html"
title="Ashley Cleek" class="articleOpinion-byline--link">Ashley
Cleek</a><br>
<b><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/6/3/filthy-water-and-poor-sewers-plague-poor-black-belt-counties.html">http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/6/3/filthy-water-and-poor-sewers-plague-poor-black-belt-counties.html</a></small></small></b><br>
</span> </div>
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<p>HAYNEVILLE, Ala. — Rain makes Charlie Mae Martin Holcombe
nervous. First, her toilets start to bubble. Then, if Holcombe
sees a bright red light flash on across the street, she knows
the city sewer system is going to back up, filling her yard
with raw sewage.</p>
<p>“When the weather man goes to talking about bad storms, you
worry sick that everything is going to flood up. [Sewage] was
coming back in my bathtub one time. I broke down crying,”
Holcombe explained.</p>
<p>For 32 years, Holcombe, 66, has lived outside the town of
Hayneville in Lowndes County, Alabama. She pays for city sewer
and installed a septic system for backup. Across the street
from her house is the city's lagoon sewage system, a series of
football-field-size ponds that hold waste before it is
treated. For years, rain has caused the lagoon to overflow and
back up into Holcombe's front yard. Every time the red light
goes on, Holcombe reports the problem to the city and drives
with her husband and son to a family member's house where they
can use the bathroom and take a shower while the city pumps
out her yard. Recently, a team of professors from Baylor
College of Medicine took samples of the soil in Holcombe's
front yard and cautioned her not to let the children in her
family play outside.</p>
<p>For decades, across a region known as the Black Belt for its
past as Alabama's cotton capital, poor counties have struggled
with inefficient or non-existent sewer systems. Much of the
soil is a chalky clay that prevents water from percolating
into the earth, causing septic tanks to back up, lagoons to
run over, and sewage to pool in yards and roads. According to
census data from 2010, only around 20 percent of the people in
Lowndes County can connect to the municipal sewer, while 80
percent must finance their own method to dispose of waste.
Scientists and activists worry that the area's inability to
deal with sewage poses serious health risks, including the
reemergence of parasitic diseases long thought eradicated in
the U.S.</p>
<p>In 2011, the U.N. Special Rapporteur issued a <a
target="_blank"
href="http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/docs/18session/A-HRC-18-33-Add4_en.pdf">report</a>
about poor sanitation and the access to safe drinking water
throughout the U.S. The report highlighted communities in
California's San Joaquin Valley, in Appalachia, and Alabama's
Black Belt. These are regions that have been historically
poverty-stricken with little access to higher education or
steady employment, and where life and infrastructure have
barely improved in decades. The Alabama Department of Public
Health estimates 40 to 90 percent of households have either
inadequate or no septic system and of the systems that have
been installed, half are failing.</p>
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<p>When Dr. Jefferson Underwood started practicing internal
medicine in Alabama in the 1980s, he saw many patients from
the Black Belt who complained of nausea, vomiting and
diarrhea, and encountered diseases he had only read about in
medical textbooks.</p>
<p>“Intestinal worms. I have even seen patients who had hepatic
cysts from parasites,” he said, explaining that such diseases
are linked to poor sanitation and assumed to exist only in
developing countries. Underwood never thought to connect the
problems he was seeing to the area's lack of sewer systems.
Now looking back, he wonders.</p>
<p>Alabama's Black Belt has long been plagued with diseases
related to poor sewage, like hookworm, a tiny parasite that
enters the body often through bare feet and sucks blood from
the lining of the intestines. While hookworm is not deadly, it
can stunt growth, cause intellectual delays and lead to
anemia.</p>
<p>A graduate research paper from 1993 notes that at a small
clinic in one county in the Black Belt, <a target="_blank"
href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2091580-pdf1-hookworm1993.html">34
percent of children under 10 were infected with hookworm
[PDF]</a>.</p>
<p>Catherine Coleman Flowers walks behind an old trailer, where
a PVC pipe drips raw sewage into marshy grass. The water runs
into a small ditch and flows into a thin stream full of
excrement and trash. A rectangular scrap of corrugated metal
separates the polluted stream from a neighbor's basketball
hoop.</p>
<p>Flowers is the founder and executive director of the
nonprofit <a href="http://acrecdc.com/" target="_blank">Alabama
Center for Rural Enterprise</a> (ACRE). She grew up in
Lowndes and a few years ago conducted a door-to-door survey
about sewage and sanitation across the county.</p>
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<p>For years during the course of her visits, residents
complained to Flowers about persistent nausea and diarrhea.
After reading a The New York Times <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/opinion/sunday/tropical-diseases-the-new-plague-of-poverty.html?_r=0">op-ed</a>
by Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical
Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, about how poor
communities across the South are at risk for tropical
diseases, Flowers asked Hotez to run tests in the Black Belt. </p>
<p>In August 2013, Hotez and Dr. Rojelio Mejia traveled to
Lowndes to test residents for parasites and protozoans like
hookworm, ascaris and strongyloides — all of which are
associated with poor sanitation.</p>
<p>“As soon as there is an area with poor sanitation and rain,
that's where I look,” explained Mejia. He has not yet
published the results of the test but warns these parasites
are still an issue in Alabama.</p>
<p>However, state epidemiologist Dr. Mary McIntyre, who has
worked for the Alabama Department of Public Health since 2011,
said the state has received no complaints and no positive
tests to indicate that there is any outbreak of
gastrointestinal diseases in the Black Belt. She said the
state would like to test the population but cannot force
residents to submit to examinations.</p>
<p>Legally, Alabama requires that all homes have a working
septic system. However, many residents cannot afford to
purchase or maintain a septic tank.</p>
<p>“We have been trying to get help to deal with this for years.
The state has been trying to go after the homeowner, but the
land doesn’t percolate — [the homeowners] can’t change that,”
Flowers said. “And the remedy is too expensive for the average
family.”</p>
<p>Lowndes is one of the poorest counties in the nation. The
median household income is around $26,000. There are few jobs.
One-quarter of residents live in poverty, and a septic system
can cost from $6,000 to $30,000, depending on the soil.</p>
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<p>Parrish Pugh, environmental director for the Department of
Public Health across several Black Belt counties, said it is
the responsibility of the homeowner to install and maintain a
working septic tank. In the past, lack of a working septic
tank could result in a warrant being issued for the
homeowner's arrest. Pugh said the Department of Health will
work with residents to find affordable solutions to their
sewage problem, however, if residents don't comply after
several months, legal action can be taken.</p>
<p>“People need to understand it's not just flush it and it goes
away forever,” Pugh explained. “Safe sewage disposal is most
important for a community — more than safe drinking water.”</p>
<p>Between 1999 and 2002, 10 people in Lowndes County were <a
href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2091578-pdf-3-arrests.html"
target="_blank">charged with misdemeanors for failure</a>
“to install properly functioning sewage disposal systems” and
warrants were issued for their arrests. Department of Health
officials have said they no longer issue arrest warrants as of
2002; however in 2014, the pastor of a church in the Black
Belt was arrested and charged with “improper sewage.”</p>
<p>In Alabama, the failure of sewage systems stretches across
the state. An hour’s drive from Hayneville, the city of
Uniontown received $4.8 million in 2012 to repair its sewage
system. Half of the grant was from the U.S. Department of
Agriculture (USDA), and the other half was financed by
municipal bonds.</p>
<p>No one knows how many years the old sewage spray field in
Uniontown has been overflowing into a local creek. A spray
field is a method of sewage maintenance where a plot of land
is fenced off and untreated sewage is sprayed into the field
and absorbed into the soil. However, because the soil was not
permeable, sewage water collected at the spray field's barrier
and overflowed into a nearby creek. In addition, every time it
rained, the local lagoon spilled over, flooding fields, cow
pastures and another creek. A local farmer told
environmentalists that his cows had sores on their hooves from
grazing in sewage.</p>
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<p>The city hired Sentell Engineering Inc. and approved plans to
build another spray field less than a half mile from town.</p>
<p>However, two years and $4.8 million later, environmentalists
say the problems have not been fixed and the new spray field
is unusable.</p>
<p>When Ester Calhoun first heard about the $4.8 million grant,
she was ecstatic. Calhoun grew up in Uniontown and moved back
a several years ago to find her hometown gutted by
environmental problems. Uniontown hosts an industrial
landfill, a depository for coal ash, a cheese factory, whose
smell curdles the air, and a malfunctioning sewer system.</p>
<p>Now, Calhoun and her colleague Ben Eaton believe the $4.8
million dollar grant has been wasted. </p>
<p>“We tried to tell them, ‘It's not going to work,’” Eaton, a
retired high school teacher, explained. “[We told] the city
officials, the EPA, USDA, the engineer, [U.S. Representative]
Terri Sewell, Alabama Department of Environmental Management
(ADEM). They just continued on.”</p>
<p>The problem, Eaton and Calhoun say, was that as with the old
spray field, the soil under the newly built spray field
doesn't absorb water.</p>
<p>“Even a child could understand it,” Calhoun said,
exasperated. “If it rained, God’s water don’t go in the
ground. How in the heck do you think sewage is going to go in
the ground?”</p>
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<p>Currently, the state environmental agency, ADEM, has
forbidden the city from testing the new spray field,
because the engineer failed to run tests to ensure the
ground would percolate prior to construction.<b><i> </i></b>Without
testing the spray field, the city cannot close out the
USDA grant or apply for additional funding, which
officials says they need to start another project to pipe
treated sewage into the Black Warrior River. The city
estimates that project would cost an additional $2.6
million.</p>
<p>The engineer, John Stevens, who heads Sentell
Engineering, said he could not speak about the new spray
field “because of ongoing litigation,” but that Sentell
had fixed the overflow problem at the lagoon.</p>
<p>However, <a
href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2091579-pdf-2-uniontown-sewage.html"
target="_blank">according to documents from the state
[PDF]</a>, as of last year, the lagoon continued to
overflow into a local stream, and as of March 2015, the
old spray field continues to spill around 100,000 gallons
of sewage water into another creek.</p>
<p>“All signs point to the willful ineptness of Sentell
Engineering,” argues Nelson Brooke, executive director of
the Black Warrior Riverkeeper, a nonprofit environmental
group<b><i>.</i></b> Brooke also blames the state for not
enforcing environmental regulations. “It's unbelievable
that ADEM has allowed this to go on for so long,” he said.</p>
<p>ADEM has never fined Uniontown for any violations. In
response to questions, the agency said they have “expended
significant resources” and “taken enforcement actions in
an attempt to bring the city into compliance.”</p>
<p>The city of Uniontown did not return repeated calls for
comment.</p>
<p>ADEM, Uniontown and Stevens are in ongoing litigation.</p>
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<p>Eaton and Calhoun say they have been branded “radicals” by
the Uniontown city council. Eaton said he recently had his
house appraised and learned it had depreciated by $50,000
because of the environmental problems in Uniontown<b>.</b> His
brother and sister-in-law refuse to visit because of the
smell.</p>
<p>As it nears 6 p.m., the air stagnates with the sharp smell of
sewage.</p>
<p>“You have to think, there are cattle, and where are they
drinking water from? And then they get slaughtered,” Calhoun
said. The creeks that have been polluted by sewage travel past
pastures and fields, past catfish ponds, and eventually into
the Alabama River and out in the Gulf of Mexico. “It's
everybody else’s problem too.”</p>
<p>Flowers believes this is a problem the U.S. should be able to
fix in 2015. She has invited teams of researchers and student
engineers to Lowndes County to design new, affordable sewage
treatment systems.</p>
<p>Professor Joe Brown is originally from the Black Belt and
teaches environmental engineering at Georgia Tech. One
afternoon, Brown and his students surveyed the land behind
a neighborhood of trailers. One of the trailers had a
malfunctioning septic system, while another had a PVC pipe
streaming sewage into the woods.</p>
<p>“It's an intractable, unsolved problem and a legacy of the
post-plantation non-economy that's [in the Black Belt],” Brown
explained. “These are people living at the fringes. These are
not people who are well connected politically and
economically. If a poor black person is complaining and
there’s no politician around to hear it, do they make a
sound?”</p>
<p>But Brown, like Flowers, is optimistic he and his students
will find a solution. “I am not into futile efforts,” he said,
pragmatically.</p>
<p>Holcombe, meanwhile, said she is waiting for the year when
spring break comes and her son and grandchildren can go
outside and play in their yard. Or for the night when she can
fall to sleep to the sound of rain and not fear waking up in
the morning.</p>
<p><i>Additional reporting by Marla Cichowski and Ash-har
Quraishi</i></p>
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