Speaking of Alabama

A United Nations official who tours the globe investigating extreme poverty said Thursday that areas of Alabama's Black Belt are suffering the most dire sewage disposal crisis of any place he has visited in a developed country.

"I think it's very uncommon in the First World. This is not a sight that one normally sees. I'd have to say that I haven't seen this," [Australian] Philip Alston, the UN's Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, said as he toured a Butler County community where raw sewage flows from homes through exposed PVC pipes and into open trenches and pits.

[...]

On Thursday, Alston visited communities in the Black Belt's Butler and Lowndes counties, where residents often fall ill with ailments like E. Coli and hookworm - a disease of extreme poverty long eradicated in most parts of the U.S. - in part because they do not have consistently reliable access to clean drinking water that has not been tainted by raw sewage and other contaminants.

[...]

Alston said that the unwillingness of state and local governments to help people with no access to basic services like sewage management represents a dereliction of duty.

"There is a human right for people to live decently, and that means the government has an obligation to provide people with the essentials of life, which include power, water and sewage service," Alston said.

[...]

Rather than receiving any kind of government assistance to help them get their homes hooked up to municipal sewer lines or fix their septic systems or install new ones - which often cost between $10,000 and $30,000 each in the Black Belt - the residents are held entirely responsible for such work. But good-paying jobs are hard to come by in the economically distressed region, and many people survive on meager fixed government incomes.

"When you're living off a fixed income of maybe $700 a month, there's no way for you to be able to fix the problem."

[...]

According to a UN report published in 2011, the "Alabama Department of Public Health estimates that the number of households in Lowndes County with inadequate or no septic systems range from 40 to 90 per cent.

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Named for its rich soil and located in the southern half of the state, Alabama's Black Belt is part of a ribbon of counties that stretches across the South and has a long history of poverty and racial discrimination.

The visit is part of a 15-day tour of the U.S. that Alston and his team are conducting to gather information for a report on poverty and human rights abuses in America that they expect to release in spring.

  Al.com

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