The U.S. Department of Justice on Thursday said an environmental justice probe found Alabama engaged in a pattern of inaction and neglect regarding the risks of raw sewage for residents in an impoverished Alabama county and announced a settlement agreement with the state.
The departments of Justice and Health and Human Services announced the results of the environmental justice probe and a settlement agreement with state health officials to address longstanding wastewater sanitation problems in Lowndes County, a high-poverty county between Selma and Montgomery.
“For generations, Black rural residents of Lowndes County have lacked access to basic sanitation services. And as a result, these residents have been exposed to raw sewage in their neighborhoods, their yards, their playgrounds, schools and even inside their own homes,” Clarke said. Wastewater problems are well-documented in Lowndes County, a county of about 10,000 people where 72 percent of residents are Black and 28% live in poverty. Before the Civil War, the county was home to cotton plantation owners where wealthy landowners got rich off the labor of enslaved people. The county later became a center of the struggle for voting rights and civil rights in the 1960s.
The region’s intense poverty and inadequate municipal infrastructure contribute to the problem. Maintaining septic tanks have typically been the responsibility of a homeowner, while local governments maintain sewage systems. Some homes in the rural county, where the median household income is about $31,000, still have “straight pipe” systems, letting sewage run untreated from home to yard.
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