Raw sewage polluted this Black community. Now residents are fighting back
Bobby and Sharon Smith haven't flushed their toilet normally in more than a year.
On heavy rainfall days, floodwaters encroach on the modest home they've owned since the 1980s in southwestern Illinois. Even during dry weather, raw sewage can clog the pipes, leaving a foul, lingering stench and requiring perpetual repairs with which the couple, in their 60s, can barely keep up.
"It's horrible," Sharon Smith, a local school district employee who also shares the home with her two children, said recently. "My floors, they buckled up. In my kitchen, the bottom of my sink is rotted out, and it's starting to sink in."
The Smiths' struggle to live free from chronic sewage pollution is common across their section of Cahokia Heights, a small, predominantly Black suburb located across the Mississippi River from St. Louis and formed earlier this year from the merger of three communities strained by population loss and aging infrastructure.
The environmental challenges have spiraled into what the group Centreville Citizens for Change says is a crisis, prompting the federal government to step in twice this month and more than two dozen residents, including the Smiths, to file a federal lawsuit in July alleging that "decades of government failure to ensure basic sewage and stormwater services ... have created an environmental injustice for this Black community."
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/raw-sewage-polluted-black-community-now-residents-are-fighting-back-n1277292
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Of course it's a BLACK community. They'd never let this happen to a white community unless residents were too poor and apathetic to fight back.
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