Failing septic systems in Lowndes County, Alabama: citizen participation, science, and community knowledge

ABSTRACT

The United Nations has estimated that 2.8 billion individuals across the world will not have access to safely managed sanitation in 2030. In the accounting of global sanitation access, local inequities often are invisible to those counting, especially given that many of these counters are physically distant and often external to communities suffering from lack of access. Lowndes County, Alabama, a predominantly-Black county in rural Alabama (USA), provides a window into the social, racial, and environmental injustices that are present in the rural American South. Our survey of household sanitation access in Lowndes County, implemented by a collaboration of an academic institution, a local environmental justice organisation, and residents, shows that community members in the county are aware of the problems associated with failing septic systems. Producing data that can make publicly visible the lack of access to sanitation will, however, remain a challenge until institutional and structural barriers are overcome.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental justice
• sanitation
• water infrastructure
• septic
• participation
• Lowndes County

Introduction

The UN Sustainable Development Goals are both aspirational and the benchmark by which countries showcase to the rest of the world steps taken to eradicate poverty, achieve universal rights, and further environmental sustainability. The 2022 UN Sustainable Development Goals Report found that if investments do not significantly increase to improve access to safely managed drinking water and sanitation, 1.6 billion people worldwide will still lack safely managed drinking water by 2030 and 2.8 will lack safely managed sanitation (United Nations 2022). These figures, while capturing global inequities, often mask local inequities worldwide in access to drinking water and sanitation. Some of these inequities are often invisible to those counting numbers and assessing access; counters who are often external to a community. Whereas for local community members, these inequities are highly visible stemming from decades or in some cases, centuries of racial discrimination, which has led to lack of investment in water and sanitation infrastructure. In turn, community members are highly aware of broken sewage systems, the lack of access to 24/7 running water, and the prevalence of water-borne illnesses within their communities.

Because of the emphasis on legibility and standardisation of data collection, the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP) data regarding access to safely managed drinking water and safely managed drinking sanitation suggests that the United States has near universal access with 97% of drinking water safely managed and 3% with basic status and then 98% of the population with safely managed sanitation and 1% with basic status as of 2020 (WHO/UNICEF 2023). Yet, news accounts in the US over the last decade have profiled numerous cases where communities have been unable to drink their municipal water, most notably in 2014 when the city of Flint, Michigan switched its source of drinking, resulting in an outbreak of Legionnaires disease and lead leaching into the drinking water. After decades of inadequate infrastructure funding and extreme flood events, the water system of Jackson, Mississippi collapsed in the summer of 2022. In parts of rural America, communities have faced a long-standing crisis of failing septic tanks and reliance upon straight pipes and lagoons adjacent to communities to process sanitation (Johnson et al. 2004; Wilson et al. 2008). While community members would describe the rancid smell, mold that was growing in homes, and the flooding of yards that made it impossible for children to play, these local instances rarely made it into official UN statistics. Only during the visit of the UN Rapporteur for the Human Right to Water was it noted in the subsequent 2011 report that 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 percent (UNHCR 2011)”.

Indeed, comprehensive and systematic data collection on presence and functioning of onsite or septic sanitation systems in the US has been sparse (USEPA 2021). For example, historically the US Census Bureau included a question about the type of household sanitation system in the decadal census, but this was discontinued after 1990. In 1990 it was estimated that 25% of US households were on a septic system. To get a more updated estimate, the US Census Bureau is testing the question as a part of the American Community Survey (NOWRA 2018). These questions, however, have not included measures of septic functioning. Using American Housing Survey (AHS) data, the US Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA), in a report to Congress on access to sanitation, estimated that 18% of US households do not have access to centralized treatment systems, and of these, approximately half have household incomes less than the median for the US (USEPA 2021). In completing their report, USEPA (2021, 8) noted “The absence of current electronic data on decentralized wastewater system use at a national, state, and county level is a significant impediment, substantially limiting the analysis that could be conducted to address the question posed by Congress”.

Addressing the lack of access to drinking water/sanitation infrastructure is vital to improving public health. In 2017 a study by the National School of Tropical Medicine (Baylor College of Medicine) found evidence of five tropical diseases, including hookworm in fecal samples from Lowndes County (McKenna et al. 2017). Lack of water infrastructure is also highly racialized, with households headed by a person of colour are roughly 35% more likely to live in homes without piped water compared to non-Hispanic white households (Meehan et al. 2020). Working with communities is vital for addressing racial and environmental injustices, as they possess “local knowledge” that provides a lens into causal claims about raw sewage, institutional/racial injustice, and public health outcomes (Corburn 2005) and insights into potential workable solutions. Community members with lived experiences in and deep connections to communities can be vital participants in the data collection and assessment of infrastructure access inequities. The US federal government suggests that citizen science occurs when “ … the public participates voluntarily in the scientific process, addressing real-world problems in ways that may include formulating research questions, conducting scientific experiments, collecting and analysing data, interpreting results, making new discoveries, developing technologies and applications and solving complex problems".¹ Citizen engagement in the data collection process reinforces findings on the importance of citizen participation in influencing broader agency decision making (e.g. Daley 2007) while still acknowledging significant barriers exist for many communities facing racial and environmental injustices (e.g. Daley and Reames 2015).

In this article we examine access to sanitation infrastructure in a low income, predominantly Black community in rural Alabama. We use this viewpoint to discuss some of the challenges associated with data collection in a community that has long struggled to attract public investment to address inadequate sewage infrastructure. We describe working collaboratively with community members in the development of the survey and steps taken to build trust before carrying it out. Finally, we present key findings about failing sanitation infrastructure – both septic tank failures and inadequate centralised treatment.

Materials and methods: Lowndes County and introduction to survey methodology

Lowndes County, Alabama, a rural county that is located between Montgomery and Selma, is illustrative of rural communities in the South facing a number of social, racial and environmental inequalities including endemic poverty, lack of economic opportunity, hazardous health conditions, and inadequate infrastructure. Lowndes County is similar to other rural communities in the South that have experienced not only social and environmental inequalities, stemming from centuries of racism. Historical, socioeconomic, and environmental factors also present challenges to managing the county’s wastewater. Only two municipalities in the county maintain centralised wastewater treatment lagoons, while the remaining rural population is served by on-site septic systems or lack adequate sanitation. According to the above-mentioned UN Human Rights Council report (2011), “50 percent of the conventional, on-site septic systems are currently failing or are expected to fail in the future” (6). The rural areas of the county are predominantly African American, especially the rural, poor southwest region of the county.

In the summer of 2018, Duke researchers, in collaboration with the Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise (ACRE), now named Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice (CREEJ), developed a survey to collect household and individual-level data to improve our understanding of access to sewage treatment and household health in Lowndes County. The draft survey and research protocol were reviewed by Duke’s Campus Institutional Review Board (IRB # 2017-1391). The survey built on a pilot survey conducted by Duke researchers and ACRE in 2015. Six long-time residents of Lowndes County were hired as survey enumerators to administer the 2018 survey across the five county commission districts in the county. Prior to the administration of the survey, researchers from Duke University met with the enumerators to review the survey instrument and make revisions. Some of the community members serving as enumerators had experienced, directly or indirectly through family members and neighbours, failures in septic and/or inadequate centralised lagoon systems. These community members, trusted leaders in their communities, brought their local knowledge to the development of the survey – providing insights into what questions could and should be asked and what were too sensitive to broach. They were honest about the length of the survey (too long) and suggested where to shorten. In addition, a local manager was hired to manage the implementation of the survey. The manager served as a liaison between the community member enumerators and other members of the research team. Over the summer and fall of 2018, approximately 300 households were surveyed across the five commission districts of Lowndes County.

Making publicly visible what is already community known: challenges of data collection and analysis

Before we present the data below, this viewpoint article seeks to shed light on the difficulties of analysing and making publicly visible data that could expose vulnerable communities to harm even though the data makes the case for policy interventions to improve sanitation infrastructure.

We are only able to present the data at the commission district level, because if we showed the data at a more granular level, households could be at risk of legal action for failure to maintain their septic systems. Since 2002, residents in Lowndes County have faced legal action (including arrests) for the violation of the state health code owing to the lack of functioning septic systems (Bryan 2003; Carrera 2014). Installation of on-site septic systems, however, can cost between $6000 and $30,000 due to the highly impermeable clay soils in the region (Equal Justice Initiative 2012). With such high costs of installation in an impoverished area, many residents are unable to install such systems and must divert waste to nearby streams and ditches, endangering the water quality of streams, rivers and drinking water sources. As such, if we were to make public fine-scale maps of the county with septic failures, we place residents of Lowndes County at risk.

Carrying out such surveys has depended on building trust via a partnership with community members.² In many ways, this project was built upon the local knowledge of the community and the problems facing community members. As documented in Catherine Coleman Flowers’ (2020) book, Waste, the prevalence of failing septic systems and straight piping in homes was “America’s dirty secret”. As such, this meant that we did not carry out a random survey, but rather one that relied more upon relationships among CREEJ, a trusted, local non-governmental organisation, the enumerators, and community members, and their knowledge of the history of wastewater infrastructure in the community. Increasingly, scientists are understanding the need to turn to local knowledge to formulate effective technical and political decisions (Corburn 2005). Thus, from a survey design perspective, community members were involved in the co-design of the sampling protocol and led the sampling, as they understood the extent of the failure of septic systems in Lowndes County and the history of failures of centralised systems in the county. Another advantage of having community members lead the sampling process was that many households may use a post office box for their mail, or several family members may live on a property with the same address, all of which might not be captured through county or census data. It is a common living pattern in the county for multiple dwellings to be located on one parcel of land. From a sampling methodology perspective, this may result in bias, with the potential for oversampling households with known waste water issues, but we were more concerned about adhering to a participatory and just process to understand the extent of the raw sewage problem, as well as community members’ understandings of the problem.

Results: summary of overall demographics and by commission district

The 304 household surveys were conducted across the five commission districts in the county, with a total of 294 households in the final cleaned data set (Table 1). Of the households that were surveyed in Lowndes County, 56.9% of household members identify as female and 57.9% of household members are adults. Nearly 100% of household members identify as Black or African American. Approximately 14% of households include a disabled household member and about 19% of total household members are disabled. Of households surveyed, 38.5% of households include at least one person with post-secondary education (Table 2).

Table 1. Location of surveyed households by commission district.

District	Count	Percentage
1	101	34.4
2	43	14.6
3	39	13.3
4	38	12.9
5	73	24.8
Total	294	100

Table 2. Number and demographics of households.

District	# Households responding	% of households with secondary education (%)	% Employed (of adults) (%)	% Retired (of adults) (%)	% lived in home > 25 years
1	101	44.9	48.0	15.8	26.5
2	43	26.8	35.0	5.0	42.2
3	39	8.8	49.2	13.6	30.6
4	38	18.2	56.6	17.0	33.3
5	73	56.2	38.4	18.5	37.0
Overall	294	37.6	45.0	15.6	33.2

Education attainment varied significantly across commission districts, with the highest level of post-secondary educational attainment in District 5 (56.2%) and the lowest in District 3 (8.8%) (Table 2). Overall, 45% of adult household members are employed and 15.6% are retired. Across all households that were surveyed, roughly a third have lived in their current homes for more than 25 years.

Homes and sewage treatment type

About 80% of households surveyed own their own homes, with homeownership rates varying significantly across commission districts, with District 3 having the lowest home ownership rate (52.6%) (Table 3). The home ownership reported by the US Census Bureau for Lowndes County (American Community Survey five year estimates, 2019, was 74.3%, similar to our sample. In comparison, the homeownership rate in Alabama was 68.8% (US Census 2023) and 64.0% in the US. Approximately half of all surveyed households live in a mobile home, with households surveyed in District 2 having the highest level of mobile home occupancy (83.3%). Of the total households surveyed, approximately 71.6% have a septic system and 45% are connected to a municipal sewage lagoon.

Table 3. Summary statistics of home infrastructure.

District	# Households responding	% Home ownership	% Mobile home	Average # bedrooms	Average # bathrooms	% Septic system	% Sewer	% Well
1	101	78.6	47.5	3.1	1.9	92.1	0	0
2	43	85.7	83.3	2.9	2.0	42.9	26.8	76.2
3	39	52.6	24.3	2.7	1.6	11.1	90.9	0
4	38	92.1	59.5	2.8	1.6	40.0	64.7	0
5	73	90.4	49.3	3.1	1.8	97.3^(1)	91.8	0
Overall	294	81.0	50.7	3.0	1.8	71.6	45.0	11.1

(1) Many households, particularly in Hayneville are on both a septic tank and tied to the municipal lagoon. This explains why the percent septic system and percent sewer exceeds 100% in total.

Raw sewage in communities, yards, and homes

Despite the United States population having near universal access to safely managed drinking water and sanitation according to the UN, many residents in rural America lack connections to municipal drinking water, and are not served by municipal sewage systems. More than 40 million Americans rely upon private wells for their drinking water, which means that the Safe Drinking Water Act does not regulate the quality of their drinking water. Similarly, for those that are not served by a municipal sewage system, they must maintain their own on-site systems.

The survey included a series of questions asking about the presence of raw sewage in respondents’ communities, yards, and homes. When asked about the severity of raw sewage as a problem for their community, 59% of respondents stated that it is a severe problem (Table 4). Respondents in District 5 most frequently reported severe raw sewage problems in their community (93.2%, Table 4). Roughly 26% of respondents said that raw sewage is a severe problem for their household, with respondents in Districts 1 and 2 reported more severe problems as compared to the other districts. Nine percent of total respondents reported the presence of raw sewage in their yard at least monthly, with the greatest frequency reported in District 2 (29.2%).

Table 4. Presence of raw sewage in community, yard and household.

District	% household that state raw sewage in community severe problem	% household that state raw sewage for household severe problem	% Raw sewage in yard (at least monthly)
1	39.8	34.5	0
2	58.1	39.5	29.2
3	27.6	0	9.7
4	60.6	21.9	13.9
5	93.2	20.5	6.9
Overall	59.0	26.4	9.4

Septic systems, sewers, and their failures

Of the 278 people responding to this question, 199 respondents have a septic system at their home, whereas 133 are connected to a centralised sewage lagoon system. Approximately 27.8% of respondents with septic systems reported that their system never, rarely, or sometimes works properly (Table 5, % Septic problem). Residents in District 5 have the oldest septic systems, reported the most frequent smells and stated that they need to pump their systems most frequently. Of those residents in the County that reported a septic system older than 25 years (79 households), approximately half (52%) have their septic systems pumped more than once a year.

Table 5. Septic systems and their failures.

District	Number of homes with septic	% Septic > 25 years	% Septic problem	% Odours	% Pump more than once a year
1	93	32.3	29.9	20.4	39.1
2	18	38.9	25.0	14.7	35.3
3	3	0	33.3	50.0	50.0
4	14	25	28.6	64.3	42.9
5	71	54.9	25.4	54.2	52.2
Overall	199	40.3	27.8	34.0	44.4

Thus, while residents are aware of the problem of raw sewage and increasingly have spoken out about the problem (Charles 2020; Pilkington 2017), concern remains that if household level data are published without institutional protections, residents could be subjected to fines for not being able to maintain broken septic systems or be required to install new systems.

Discussion and conclusions

Lowndes County illustrates the social, racial and environmental injustices that have occurred in many rural communities of the South. Our results show that community members in the county are well aware of the reality and problems associated with failing septic systems. Yet, owing to institutional barriers, these problems and potential links to health impacts have been less visible at the national stage and not fully accounted for in UN statistics regarding universal access to safe drinking water and sanitation. Rather, only owing to the work of environmental defenders/activists has the problem of raw sewage been publicised at the national level. Until the institutional and structural barriers are overcome, it will be difficult both to identify the specific homes that require investments and produce the data that can make it publicly visible/known that the United States should not be considered as having universal access.

More so, with the passage of the U.S. Infrastructure and Investment Jobs Act and the initiative between EPA and USDA to provide wastewater sanitation to underserved rural areas, survey data at the household level will be increasingly important to understand barriers to implementation that include physical constraints (e.g. soil type) as well as homeowner preferences for designs/solutions for wastewater systems, especially ones that are climate resilient. Given the long history of under-funding of sanitation infrastructure in the County, it will be important to undertake a planning process that engages the local community to ensure workable and fair infrastructure investments. In May 2023, Alabama reached an interim agreement with the US Departments of Justice (USDOJ) and Health and Human Services to assume responsibility for providing adequate sewage infrastructure to all Lowndes County residents regardless of their ability to pay. Under the agreement, the Alabama Department of Public Health (ADPH) is required to engage with local communities, environmental justice advocates, local governments and sanitation experts to develop a comprehensive treatment plan within one year. ADPH has also agreed to suspend enforcement of punitive sanitation laws, work with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to measure health risks from raw sewage exposure, and launch a public health public awareness campaign. When announcing the agreement, Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke commented,

Our agreement puts Lowndes County on a path to long overdue reform as the state now takes steps necessary to provide access to basic sanitation services, end exposure to raw sewage and improve health outcomes for marginalized communities. This agreement marks the first environmental justice settlement ever secured by the Justice Department under our civil rights laws. (USDOJ 2023)

Acknowledgements

We greatly appreciate the information provided by over 300 community members who participated in the survey. We also appreciate contributions from the following individuals. Stephanie Wallace served as community liaison for the study and survey team leader. Community members who provided feedback on the survey and worked as survey enumerators were Quanitia Oliver, Ruby Rudolph, Sandy Oliver, Pamela Rush, Aaron Thigpen, Patricia Means, Mary McDonald, and Shirley Shabazz. We thank Michelle Pender at Duke Global Health Institute for her assistance with the survey design and data management and Emily Stewart at the Duke Human Rights Center for her administrative support. The research was financially supported by Duke Global Health Institute. We dedicate this publication to the memory of community member Pamela Rush.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Duke Global Health Institute and Bass Connections, Duke University.

Notes

1 citizenscience.gov, 2023.

2 For background on this partnership, see Weinthal et al. 2018.