Water contamination in Black communities doesn’t stop at Flint or Jackson

In a lot of ways, the water crises in Flint, Michigan and Jackson, Mississippi, put lead-poisoned water on the map. And while the Biden administration has since earmarked more than $50 billion to replace lead pipes and build water treatment plants, a 2018 report by the Environmental Protection Agency shows that the country will actually need more than $470 billion to maintain and improve drinking water infrastructure over the next 20 years.

In particular, the waterways that need the most help are overwhelmingly in Black communities.

Adam Mahoney is a national climate and environment reporter with Capital B, a news organization focused on Black communities. He went on a reporting trip through communities in the South that have been hit the hardest by water access issues, and joined Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams to talk about what he found. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Kimberly Adams: So tell me about some of these places you visited.

Adam Mahoney: Yeah, it was kind of a personal project for me in many regards. My grandparents are from the South, and I stopped in their communities first. So Beaumont, Texas — which is home to the seventh-largest oil refinery in the entire world. And then I also stopped in Opelousas, Louisiana, where my grandmother was born. And then we focused on other, bigger cities throughout the region. So Lake Charles, Louisiana, in addition to Jackson, Mississippi, and then Memphis, Tennessee.

Adams: Can you give us a sense of scale in terms of how many people are being affected by these kinds of water crises that you describe?

Mahoney: Yeah, I mean, when we look at our water infrastructure system, there are thousands of failing water plants, and cities, communities that are dealing with outdated water lines, dealing with lead water lines. So it’s a widespread issue. When I was traveling throughout the South, I visited 11 cities. Every single city had water problems, had recently had a water-boil notice within the last year, had reported having brown water trickling through their faucets. So this is something that is widespread, and it is found at every level — from rural to urban.

Adams: So the through line in this piece is that clean and consistent water access across the South, in these Black communities in particular, is bad. But the reasons are pretty varied. What were some of the reasons in these different communities?

Mahoney: So really, this project broke it down into three major parts: the way that climate change has been impacting the water crisis, our dependence on the fossil fuel industry, in addition to the infrastructure crisis. You know, infrastructure improvements, while they’re super important, they don’t necessarily get to the core of the crisis. Water — which is a life-sustaining thing, right? We need it, you know, literally to live — if it has been contaminated for so long, even when it does become clear per se, there’s still that element of “Can I trust it?”

Adams: One reason you point out for how it got so bad is the way that we as a country fund water systems has changed in the last few decades. What happened?

Mahoney: Over the last 50 years, the federal funding of local water systems has declined by something, you know, close to 75% or 85%. And it was really accelerated and spurred by a change in the 1980s, which switched federal support for water projects at the local level from a grant system to loans. And city budgets are just not that large; they didn’t have the funds to consistently upgrade infrastructure.

Adams: So how did it end up that so many of these problematic water systems tend to be in predominantly Black communities?

Mahoney: I mean, I think it goes back to residential segregation, redlining and just the fact that, you know, Black and Brown folks, low-income people, have been relegated to be concentrated in our country’s toxic corridors; the places that don’t have, you know, financial support, the places where these industrial companies set up business and have been polluting for decades.

Adams: You know, you’re talking sort of big picture there, but, as you said when we first got started, your family’s from some of these places. The more you learned about how bad the water was in some of these communities, how did that make you feel when you know that it was your own family drinking it?

Mahoney: Yeah, I mean, it was definitely a difficult trip. And it was eye-opening for me, right? I didn’t necessarily make all the connections between water contamination and a lot of the different social ills that are impacting communities. So Opelousas, where my grandmother was born, has the third highest rate of poverty in Louisiana. It also has the second-highest rate of gun violence. And folks there were making the connections between water contamination and gun violence. Different studies have shown that water contamination — particularly when we think about lead poisoning — affects mood, thought processing and cognitive development. So all of these things feed into each other and interact in a way that we don’t necessarily think about even though we are facing these forms of violence.

Adams: Did you have any moments on your trip where you saw something or someone working to address this issue and you really thought, “That’s it. That’s how we fix this”?

Mahoney: Yeah, I mean, I can highlight Opelousas. I spoke to a couple there that, over the last couple of years, they’ve used their voices in activism. But what I thought was really amazing about their approach was that it was community-centered. And when we focus on these big-picture issues that have these multibillion-dollar price tags, it gets very daunting. But when you start at the local level, when you start with your neighbors in your community, it becomes easier. So really that ground-up approach that I saw all throughout the South, not only in Opelousas, was really exciting and meaningful to me.