Aside from breakfast at PieLab, my only structured activity on Friday was an interview with JJ (a grad student working on sanitation) and Pauline Johnson (a professor at the University of Alabama Tuscaloosa). When my alarm buzzed at 6:30 this morning, I was quite unsure as to what this interview would bring. All I knew was that it was about sewage or rather the lack of sewage treatment in the region. If you know anything about me, it is that I hate to be unprepared. But I was relying on James' preparation. Thankfully, we formulated a plan on the 45 minute drive down for questions and the general theme of interviews.
When we (Ryan, James and I) met JJ and Pauline, I realized that both women had so much knowledge they wanted to share with us. The first striking thing about this conversation was that the population of the Black Belt region is not only living in poverty but they have also been blighted with some of the most impermeable soil in the region. In rural regions, this means that the traditional septic tank system will not work. (Aside: If you are anything like me and don't understand the traditional septic tank system, here is my caricature of an explanation. All the waste from the house flows into the septic tank where it is kept for a while so that the waste separates from the liquid. The liquid is then treated by normally good soil. The septic tank has to be emptied every three years or it fails.) In the Black Belt, the water discharge from the septic tank will only stay on the top layer of soil. Thus it will not get treated by the soil. In order to have effective sanitation, these people are forced to get engineered systems which cost along the lines of 30,000 - 40,000 (keep in mind that this figure can be more than two times the amount someone would earn in a year).
The current solution to this problem is to run a pipe for sewage from the trailer to a ditch about 12ft away; Some people just let the sewage go right under the house. Because the soil is impermeable, the sewage stays on the surface and is washed everywhere by any rainfall. The waste water contaminates wells and waterways in the area. Most homes rely on well water, many of these families are at risk of contamination. In addition, children play in these yards, increasing their risk. The black belt residents have been living this way for years and subsequently don't view this as a problem. Most consequences of prolonged exposure to sewage--Nausea, stomach aches, headaches-- are accredited to living pains. People in this situation do not consider the lack of sewage treatment a problem. Professor Johnson related a very telling story. When her students and she were working on a system for a young woman living the black belt, the young woman asked if they wouldn’t just build her a porch instead.
While working on the sewage problem, Pauline and a couple of her students worked on several interesting solutions. One of the most promising solutions involved treating the black water (water from the toilet and the kitchen sink) and bypassing the gray water (sinks and showers) to surface water. They approached the state board of health for approval of this system. Though this solution was better than the current solution, it was not approved because it would violate the EPA's clean act (this states that no liquid can be discharged into any surface waterway in the USA). Municipalities can discharge treated water with a permit and large corporations can dump, treated or untreated, water with a waiver. Individuals do not have this same privilege. Other innovative solutions required more effort on the part of the residents. Because the people don’t view it as a problem, getting them to move from a free and convenient system to a relatively inexpensive and time consuming system will be a big problem.
This whole meeting energized both James and I on the sanitation issue. We still wonder how does one engage people to actually believe that sanitation is in fact an issue. Without resident buy-in, it will be an uphill battle to collaboratively solve this problem.
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