Wastewater Is The Infrastructure Crisis ‘People Don’t Want To Talk About’

BY ISABELLA ISAACS-THOMAS / PBS NewsHour 

If you want an example of how infrastructure failures directly affect the lives of people in this country, you don’t have to look far.

The residents of Flint, Michigan, went years without safe drinking water after theirs was contaminated with lead leached from aging pipes. This year, a catastrophic winter storm temporarily left millions of people in Texas without access to electricity or clean water. That same storm led to the collapse of the local water infrastructure in Jackson, Mississippi, where residents were forced to boil the water that came out of their taps for over a month.

It’s clear that public health disasters occur — especially in America’s most marginalized communities — when infrastructure is left to age without much-needed updates that account for circumstances like climate change and population shifts.

Some infrastructure concerns go far less discussed than others including, notably, the issue of wastewater and sanitation. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, the country’s wastewater treatment plants are functioning at an average of “81 percent of their design capacities,” and 15 percent have “reached or exceeded” that capacity. Drinking water service disruptions and flooding from sewer backups and other infrastructure failures cost U.S. households $2 billion in 2019. The ASCE predicts that figure will balloon to $14 billion in the next two decades.

But a significant percentage of American households — about 20 percent — are not connected to public plants, and instead use septic tanks or other wastewater systems that are directly connected to their homes. For communities in which any of those systems fail, the public health and socioeconomic consequences of uncontrolled sewage can be devastating.

Environmental justice activist and 2020 MacArthur Fellow Catherine Coleman Flowers speaks at a “Fire Drill Fridays” event, part of a movement that seeks to draw attention to the global “climate emergency.” Courtesy of Catherine Coleman Flowers

It’s a pervasive issue that environmental justice activist and author Catherine Coleman Flowers, who was named a 2020 MacArthur fellow, knows well. She has dedicated much of her life’s work — which she documents in her 2020 book, “Waste: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret” — to drawing attention to the systemic inequalities that deny so many poor, rural and marginalized communities in the U.S. access to functioning water infrastructure.

A turning point in Coleman Flowers’ career came when she returned to her home community in Lowndes County, Alabama, to work as the economic development coordinator. That position involved working to incentivize businesses to both provide services that were not available in the county at the time and to bring in new jobs.

“What I found out during that process is that without infrastructure, businesses can’t come. If the county or the town doesn’t have the money to build… the basic infrastructure like [water and sanitation], that’s an issue,” Coleman Flowers said.

The water-logged soils of Lowndes County are not able to support sanitation systems that have been prescribed by the state. Compounding factors like a water table that continues to rise as a result of climate change, she added, have intensified the problem to the point that many residents of the County — more than 70 percent of whom are Black — are left with a persistent sanitation problem that jeopardizes both their access to economic opportunity and their health. A 2017 study published in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, for which Coleman Flowers collaborated with researchers, found that about a third of the 55 Lowndes County residents involved tested positive for hookworm, a gastrointestinal parasite that thrives where wastewater goes untreated.

When their wastewater systems fail, Coleman Flowers said, sewage backs up into these residents’ homes, or spills out onto the ground outside.

“This is a problem that has been ignored largely because I think rural people have been ignored,” she said. Although water infrastructure failures of many kinds affect communities across the nation, she notes that “the problem is more stark in places where people have been marginalized and denied access to infrastructure — period — and left to their own devices.”

Coleman Flowers doesn’t advocate for a top-down approach to these issues, but instead for one that centers community members first and foremost.

She is the founder of the nonprofit Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice (CREEJ), which collaborates with grassroots organizers across the country to document wastewater issues in their communities and partnering them with scientists who can help “validate what they’re seeing on the ground.” Coleman Flowers said the group has been contacted by residents in from California’s Central Valley, southern Illinois, Alaska and the Navajo Nation, among others.

“This is not just a Southern problem,” said Coleman Flowers. “It’s a rural problem, and it’s an American problem.”

CREEJ also aims to help elected officials work with people from the affected communities to design just policies that work for under-funded, unincorporated parts of the country.

In addition to drawing visibility to the domino effect that lack of water infrastructure has in America’s rural communities, Coleman Flowers advocates for technological solutions — like novel functional, affordable and reliable wastewater treatment systems — that all people can access.

“We have infrastructure that has been designed, a built environment that does not take into account the natural ecosystem,” she said. “And the ecosystem is winning.”

Coleman Flowers spoke to the PBS NewsHour about the work she’s doing now, the importance of upholding a “rural lexicon” when people outside of those communities address issues that impact them and her vision for a future that centers and solves water infrastructure issues.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Why do you think sanitation gets less attention compared to other water justice issues?

People don’t want to talk about wastewater, especially when talking about what comes out of the human body.

I’ve had people come to me and say they’ve lived in affluent communities and when they have sunny day flooding, when they look into it, they see feces, human feces. But they don’t want to talk about it publicly because they’re afraid that it’s going to damage their property value.

What makes [marginalized] communities even more vulnerable is because a lot of them don’t have access to anything. There’s an intersectionality of poverty, there’s an intersectionality of racism. When you have those intertwined, then the health care disparities are factored in, too. So in the case of the wastewater problem, if you leave poor people to their own devices to solve this, first of all, they don’t have the money. And second, those that can afford it may put the systems in place and they fail — [the sewage is] coming back into their homes.

Can you give an example of the economic burdens that can result from inadequate wastewater systems?

We tried to help a family get a septic system recently and, as a case study, paid for the engineering that was done on the property. When they dug to do the perc test, which is necessary to determine what type of septic system or wastewater treatment system should go on that property, they struck water at 25 inches underground. That meant a different, more expensive system needed to go there that was going to cost $28,000 for a poor family that had an income of less than a thousand dollars a month.

What are some of the commonalities you’ve seen across communities you’ve visited and worked with that are fighting for water infrastructure?

What we’re finding is that those that don’t have infrastructure at all are primarily communities of color. But I’ve also seen in Appalachia and other rural areas where people are white and are poor, they’re having similar issues. There are failures around the country… no matter whether it’s melting permafrost or sandy soils or clays, like we have in Lowndes County.