Overview:
The Trump administration has terminated a historic settlement with local public health officials over straight piping, an illegal and environmentally hazardous way to dispose of human waste in low-income households without access to a municipal water system. The agreement, which would have not only helped find a solution to straight piping but ended the fines residents have had to pay, was part of President Donald Trump's crusade against all federal programs that touch on diversity, equity, and inclusion. Straight piping is a waste-treatment solution as utilitarian as its name, often the only option for low-income Lowndes County households due to the lingering effects of segregation and the high cost of septic systems.
It’s no mystery what happens when some poor, Black residents in rural Lowndes County, Alabama, flush the toilet: raw sewage flows into their yards, collecting in a fetid pool. The end result — disease-bearing mosquitoes, hookworm, and other parasites are drawn to the sewage, then prey on children and adults — is just as obvious.
So it was big news when the Biden administration reached a historic settlement with local public-health officials over straight piping, an illegal, environmentally hazardous way to get rid of human waste in low-income households without access to a municipal water system. The agreement halted any fines levied against residents or other means of criminalization.
But the Trump administration believes the settlement goes too far — and that the residents of Lowndes County, who have dealt with the issue for decades, shouldn’t get help with a potentially deadly health hazard just because they are Black.
Last week the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division announced it has backed out of a 2023 settlement with the Alabama Department of Public Health that would have not only helped find a solution to straight piping but ended the fines residents have had to pay. The move is part of President Donald Trump’s crusade against all federal programs that touch on diversity, equity and inclusion.
“The DOJ will no longer push ‘environmental justice’ as viewed through a distorting, DEI lens,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department said in a release last Friday. “President Trump made it clear: Americans deserve a government committed to serving every individual with dignity and respect, and to expending taxpayer resources in accordance with the national interest, not arbitrary criteria.”
Straight piping is a waste-treatment solution as utilitarian as its name: whatever is flushed runs along a straight pipe out of the house and is deposited in a not-so-far-off corner of the yard. In this rural, very poor, majority-minority community – around 72 percent of residents are Black – straight piping is a wastewater solution of last resort.
Most houses that use the method don’t have access to municipal sewer systems — in part because of the lingering effects of segregation — or they can’t afford to connect, an expense that can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Septic systems are cheaper but still costly, and they often don’t work well in the region’s dense, heavy clay soil.
Despite the fact that it’s both dangerous and illegal, straight piping is often the only option for low-income Lowndes County households. That’s part of what made the agreement both so necessary and historic: it acknowledged that there was nothing much else that residents could do.
It’s unclear exactly what will happen now that the Trump administration has terminated the agreement. The Alabama Department of Public Health told AL.com that work being done on providing safe wastewater solutions will continue for the time being.
“The installation of sanitation systems and related infrastructure is outside the authority or responsibilities conferred upon ADPH by state law,” a spokesperson said. “Nonetheless, ADPH will continue working with subgrantees on installation of septic systems as contemplated by the [settlement] agreement until appropriated funding expires.”
At that point, the department said it “will support and be available to provide technical assistance to other organizations that may choose to engage in this work.”
Catherine Coleman Flowers, the environmental justice activist born and raised in Lowndes County, said her community and others like it have been dealing with the straight-piping issue for decades — along with diseases like hookworm and yellow fever that go along with it. Cancelling the agreement, she said, won’t make the problem go away.
“The people of Lowndes County exposed this issue to the American public,” she said. “I pray that today’s action means that this administration will make sanitation a priority for all who are affected throughout rural America,”
Until that happens, straight piping will continue in Lowndes County, as it has for the last two years too –and it will be criminalized once again.
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