Water Sector News
A snapshot of clean water stories from publications around the country, updated daily!
Closing the ‘Wastewater Gap’ in the Black Belt
https://www.planetizen.com/news/2024/02/127513-closing-wastewater-gap-black-belt
This week the Federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced funding that will help address years of neglect of wastewater infrastructure in the Black Belt, “a crescent of rural, majority-Black communities stretching from eastern Texas to southern Virginia,” reports Willy Blackmore in an article for Word in Black.
The funding, part of the Biden Administration's Closing the Water Access Gap, will go toward creating or upgrading sewers, drainage, and septic systems in 150 rural U.S. communities, including several mostly-Black enclaves in Alabama and Mississippi. It represents an expansion of a successful pilot program in Lowndes County, Alabama — “a majority-Black, low-income community where residents lacked access to the kind of municipal water infrastructure that most people take for granted,” Blackmore writes.