USDA and EPA officials tour Black Belt county to see chronic sewage problems, a disproportionately rural issue

Department of Agriculture Undersecretary for Rural Development Xochitl Torres Small, EPA Administrator Michael Regan and activist Catherine Coleman Flowers toured a mobile home park in Lowndes County, Alabama, with standing pools of raw sewage in the yards. (AL.com photo by Dennis Pillion)

"On the eve of the Selma Jubilee, commemorating the 'Bloody Sunday' march that helped catalyze support for the Voting Rights Act 57 years ago, the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency toured Alabama’s Black Belt to witness a different kind of struggle: the battle for clean water and basic sanitation," Dennis Pillion reports for AL.com. EPA Administrator Michael Regan, Agriculture Undersecretary for Rural Development Xochitl Torres Small and other EPA and USDA officials "went to three different properties in Lowndes County Saturday, seeing homes where malfunctioning septic systems discharged untreated sewage into backyards and in between mobile homes, and where some residents had nowhere to go to address their sewage issues."

The group was led by author and activist Catherine Coleman Flowers, the founder of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice, who won a MacArthur Foundation "Genius Grant" in 2020 for bringing attention to the issue in her native county and other rural areas, Pillion reports.

More than 2 million Americans lack access to clean water, according to a 2019 report by clean-water advocacy non-profits DigDeep and the U.S. Water Alliance. It's a problem that disproportionately affects rural residents and those in substandard housing. Because rural Black, Latino and Native American residents are more likely to live in substandard housing, they're more likely to be affected.

A key to the problem is that rural populations are often too spread out to make traditional utility lines cost-effective, and sewers are the most expensive basic utility. Cash-strapped local or tribal governments are increasingly on the hook to pay for water system improvements, according to the DigDeep report. The 2021 infrastructure package earmarked $29.3 billion in grants over five years for counties to upgrade their water systems. But rural counties may miss out on much of that money, since they often lack the manpower and know-how to compete for or spend such grants.

Regan said the situation was "unacceptable" and clean water and safe sewage systems were a "basic right" that every American deserves, Pillion reports. Regan continued: "Straight piping into lagoons, failing septic systems, waste and raw sewage backing up into yards into homes, seeing children have to walk around delicately so that they don’t sink or get bogged down into their own front yards. This is not the America that we all know it should be."