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HOPE HULL, Ala.—Sherry Bradley beams with pride as a three-stage wastewater filtration system about two-thirds the length of a Volkswagen bus is lowered into the ground beside a mobile home in Lowndes County. 

“It’s a Fuji Clean,” she said, pointing out the various components, including the large black settling tanks, and the gray, submarine-looking filter apparatus that comes next in the chain.

The system is the fifth of its kind being installed in Lowndes County, which has become the flashpoint in a new civil rights struggle: the battle for effective sanitation in minority communities.

In 2021, the U.S. Department of Justice launched a civil rights investigation into whether the state of Alabama was discriminating against Black residents of Lowndes County by not providing them with adequate wastewater treatment options.

Lowndes County—a rural area between Selma and Montgomery with deep civil rights history—has struggled with wastewater issues for decades thanks to a combination of low population density, widespread poverty and a heavy, clay soil that makes many septic tank systems ineffective.

One way to combat that is through advanced septic systems like the one Bradley’s nonprofit, Black Belt Unincorporated Wastewater Projects, installed in Hope Hull.

“It’s technical, but there’s a solution,” Bradley said. “And we’re bringing the solution.”

More than a year after the Alabama Department of Public Health agreed to provide better sanitation to settle the civil rights complaint, the state’s official response is still mostly in the planning phase, though contracts have been signed for actual installations to begin.

While the state’s efforts have been slower than many would like, nonprofit groups like Bradley’s have moved forward to provide systems where they can.

For Bradley, the work continues her years-long battle to bring sanitation equity to rural Alabama. She worked for the Alabama Department of Public Health for 45 years before retiring and founding the Black Belt Unincorporated Wastewater Program, often spending nights and weekends working with the people of Lowndes County.

“When I was with the state, I was taking it up on my own time,” Bradley said, referring to her work to bring sanitation equity to this part of the state. “I worked nights, weekends and holidays. I would travel down to Lowndes County in the evening time talking to people. So this, what I’m doing, is not any different.”

Now, her wastewater nonprofit works to bring solutions to impoverished areas of Alabama’s Black Belt, a fertile crescent of dirt sweeping through south-central Alabama.

Bradley, 68, who is Black, is all business when it comes to improving conditions in the Black Belt. She’ll rattle off all 57 items on her to-do list before she tells you she grew up in southeast Alabama, Covington County, near a town called Andalusia. Covington County isn’t considered part of the Black Belt, but two neighboring counties to the north are. 

For many Alabamians, Andalusia is just a pit stop on the highway to the Florida Panhandle beaches in Destin or Pensacola, but for Bradley, it’s still home, even after more than four decades living in Montgomery. She grew up poor, living in a two-bedroom house in, as she calls it, “the worst part of Andalusia,” with her parents and seven siblings. Her father was a World War II veteran who took a bullet to the head in combat that was never removed. Neither of her parents went to school past sixth grade. She’s the only one of her immediate family to go to college. 

Bradley majored in a program called sanitary science at the time, at what was then Troy State University. Now the program is called environmental science and the school is called Troy University. Then she got a masters in public administration from Auburn University at Montgomery before joining the health department. 

Bradley said she always intended to work in public health to help the community.

“It’s been a good career for me,” she said. “It’s something that I love. I spent 45 years in it and I’m still doing it.”

The Black Belt was the heart of Alabama’s antebellum cotton plantations, but now many parts of it are rural areas with extreme poverty issues that struggle to maintain flagging populations.

Many of the remaining population live in small or mobile homes spread out wide across the countryside.

Bradley said her group has installed more than 120 onsite septic systems in the Black Belt, including five of the advanced Fuji Clean units to handle the most difficult soil conditions. The nonprofit received two major federal grants to move forward, a $2.2 million award from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and $2.1 million from the American Rescue Plan Act.

Bradley said she was introduced to the Fuji Clean systems during a trip to Alaska with Kevin White, a retired civil engineering professor from the University of South Alabama who is also still working to find sanitation solutions for the Black Belt.

The initial settling tank collects the solids like a septic tank, but the remaining water goes through a three-stage filtration process inside the unit, then is discharged underground through a layer of sand and gravel that acts as an additional filter.

The systems themselves may cost as much as $28,000, Bradley said, and that doesn’t include extra costs like removing trees or upgrading electrical systems during installation. In some cases, the septic system attached to a mobile home might cost more than the value of the home itself. 

Bradley’s nonprofit is not just installing tanks, it’s setting up the infrastructure to maintain the systems long-term.

Bradley said the nonprofit charges each new system owner $20 a month to pay for future maintenance of the systems, including pumping out the tanks when they get full. The grant funding pays for the upfront installation and subsidizes the ongoing maintenance, Bradley said.

“How did I come up with $20? Well, I asked a homeowner, what do you think is a fair amount? I started out with $60. They said, ‘No.’ When we got down to $20, they said, ‘Yeah, we can handle that.’”

She said each system includes a smart panel to alert the homeowner of potential problems, and her nonprofit is providing jobs and training for local residents in plumbing, electrical work and more.  

The group has purchased an office in Hayneville, the Lowndes County seat, and aims to become a permanent fixture in the community.

“It’s to help the people,” she said. “If they have a bill, they can bring it in. They don’t have to mail it. It also lets them know that we’re there for the long haul.”

Alabama’s Response Beginning to Show Progress

Alabama State Health Officer Dr. Scott Harris, head of the Department of Public Health, said he is pleased with the process for signing up homeowners for sanitary system installation that the department has made so far.

“It’s a really big project, and so it has taken a while to get everybody through the process,” Harris told Inside Climate News. “And in trying to educate ourselves on how to proceed, but also to communicate with and educate the public on it as well.”

Harris said the state health department was a regulator and has little experience with installing hundreds of septic systems in a wide range of soil conditions across the county.

“We have sanitation engineers who understand how these systems work, but that’s not the same as having people who install them,” he said. “So we’ve contracted out that work, but overseeing big infrastructure projects is not something that we normally have experience with.”

The Department of Public Health has circulated a survey among the 10,000 or so residents of Lowndes County to assess the scope of the project. Harris said the department is analyzing those results and still trying to get more Lowndes residents to complete the survey.

“It’s a way for us to get some sense of the scale of the project that we have, but also it lets us prioritize people, and understand who’s most at risk and who’s got the greatest need,” Harris said. “Because there’s always going to be more need than we have resources to help with.”

Funding for the project so far came mostly from the American Rescue Plan Act, federal funds that were appropriated by the Alabama Legislature to improve Black Belt infrastructure.

The settlement agreement with the Justice Department requires the department to submit a Public Health Infrastructure Improvement Plan that must be approved by the DOJ and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Harris told Inside Climate News the plan was nearly finished and should be submitted for approval in the coming weeks.

“There’s always going to be more need than we have resources to help with.”

— Dr. Scott Harris, Alabama State Health Officer

The department also signed an agreement with the Lowndes County Unincorporated Wastewater Project—a different nonprofit from Bradley’s—for $1.5 million to begin installing systems. Harris said that soil testing has begun at some properties to determine what kinds of systems are the best fit.

“We’re just excited to finally see the fruits of all this labor that’s gone on for the past year,” he said.

The scope of the project is still something of a mystery. The state’s agreement with the Justice Department does not set any benchmarks for how many homes must be addressed to satisfy the terms.

“DOJ always understood this was going to be subject to funding availability,” Harris said. “We’re asking for what we can get and then making sure that we use responsibly the resources we have.

“There’s not a hard and fast number [of systems that need to be installed].”

The Department of Public Health is also only dealing with onsite systems for individual homes. Larger municipal wastewater systems are regulated by the Alabama Department of Environmental Management, which allocated $10 million in federal funding to Hayneville to repair and extend its municipal sewer system to include more properties.

Research groups are also investigating smaller, cluster systems that serve several homes. A pilot for one type of cluster system was unveiled earlier this year in Newbern, a town in Hale County.

While the Justice Department settlement only includes Lowndes County, there are numerous others in the Black Belt with wastewater issues that may be just as bad.

Bradley said Wilcox County may actually be worse than Lowndes, but her group started in Lowndes because it was easier to get funding there.

Hookworm Concerns Spur Action

Unsanitary conditions in Lowndes received nationwide attention beginning in 2017, after researchers from Baylor University reported finding genetic evidence of hookworm in stool samples from Lowndes County residents. 

Hookworm is an intestinal parasite that can afflict humans and other animals. It is most often spread through contact with soil with fecal contamination. In humans, it is most often seen in developing countries that lack modern sanitation systems.   

The Baylor findings prompted a visit from a United Nations team later that year, and a parade of U.S. government officials, politicians and researchers since, including former Vice President Al Gore and current EPA Administrator Michael Regan. 

Bradley said the attention helped motivate her to address the problem. 

“It got to me really bad when this gentleman from the United Nations came down and said Lowndes County was like a third-world country,” Bradley said.

While the Baylor team sparked international interest in Lowndes County, subsequent teams have not been able to find evidence of hookworm in the Black Belt. The Baylor team used a new method of screening for hookworm by looking for genetic material left behind by the worms, and not the standard tests to diagnose an active infection.  

Dr. Claudette Poole, a pediatric infectious disease physician and researcher at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, said her team collected 700 stool samples from children living in Alabama’s Black Belt counties after the Baylor study was published and found no evidence of hookworm using the standard testing method.

Poole said that doesn’t mean the Baylor team was wrong, but perhaps that the genetic markers they found were from older infections, or that the infections dissipated after those samples were taken in 2011-2012.

“Because of the way the hookworm life cycle is, there is a sort of threshold prevalence in the community that you reach,” Poole told Inside Climate News. “Once you fall below that, the life cycle can’t sustain itself anymore, and it will die out. It’ll disappear.”

Poole also noted that the Baylor study only sampled 55 individuals, mostly adults, while hers had 700 children, who are thought to be at greater risk due to playing outside in contaminated soil or walking barefoot. 

But having raw sewage on the ground presents numerous potential health problems, hookworm or not.

“Whether this one study was valid or not is almost beside the point,” Harris said in 2018. “There are clear problems with the wastewater infrastructure and that needs to be addressed.

“Whether we found hookworms or didn’t,” he said, “it wouldn’t change the fact that that [infrastructure] needs to be addressed.”