Trouble the Waters | A Word … with Jason Johnson

Thanks for having me.

They're spread out all throughout the country. Our project specifically focused on rural and semi-rural communities across Texas, Louisiana, and Tennessee. And the issues are widespread, which is something that we don't often hear about when we're thinking about drinking water issues.

Not having access to water impacts nearly every facet of daily life. When we think about the psychological issues, mental health, but also physical health. It's connected to different things around kidney issues, mood, even anger. I talked to some folks in Louisiana who connected their lack of access to clean water to gun violence issues in their community, or educational attainment. When we look at water contamination, specifically lead poisoning, we know from the childhood level that affects development and it's something you live with throughout your life. So if you receive lead poisoning as a youth, it will impact you 40 years down the line. So this is something that has generational effects.

Having to purchase bottled water every day is definitely an added expense. But even in a lot of these communities, you have that layered expense, but you're also paying for the brown water coming through your pipes that you can't use. And in some communities, because of a law that was enacted in 1987 that put the burden of water infrastructure on cities versus the federal government, in a lot of these places, particularly smaller cities, rural areas, local governments have used a predatory practice to fund their water system. So in Opelousas, Louisiana, which is another small town in central Louisiana of maybe about 15,000 folks, it's the third poorest city in Louisiana, which as folks may not know, Louisiana is the second poorest state in the United States. So this is one of the poorest places in the country. The city government has used a practice of disconnecting water lines after two weeks of missed payment. Typically it's about a month or so or even longer in most places, forcing residents to pay $40 to $50 on top of their bills to have their lines reconnected. So through public records requests, we were able to find that in that town of 15,000 people, since 2018, roughly 1,500 households have had their water disconnected multiple times. So having to pay exorbitant fees to get brown water that they can't even use trickling through their pipes again.

When we have the resources taken away from us that we literally need to survive, that's violent, because it is leading to premature death in these communities. So when we typically think of violence, we do think of fast violence like gun violence or things that lead to immediate negative health impacts. But the way that environmental injustice builds up over someone's lifetime, that also contributes to premature death and needs to be looked at as something as serious as gun violence.

Like we mentioned earlier, it just adds on fees that folks don't normally think about. And when we're talking about schools, specifically one of the communities that I visited in Lake Charles, Louisiana, it's been battered by three hurricanes over the last three years, a winter snowstorm, all different kinds of severe weather events. Folks were out of school for a long time because of these events, but once they got back in, they required people to bring their own drinking water and different things. So for children, their parents having to think about this on a constant daily basis. So not only is it an economic injustice, but it does contribute to your mental health.

In the states we visited, we broke it down into three major issues. One definitely is a lack of water infrastructure, and that's something that the federal government specifically has put a lot of focus on over the last two years, making record amounts of money available, more than $50 billion available to cities across the country, which is really only a drop in the bucket because a 2018 federal government report found that it will cost $470 billion to bring our drinking water infrastructure up to code over the next two decades. But it still will have deep impacts in these communities, particularly in a place like Opelousas, where they haven't had their water plant upgraded since 1997 and it's needed improvements since then. But outside of infrastructure, a big issue across the South is industrial dumping, water contamination from industrial sites. So in Texas and in Louisiana, we have close to 150 chemical plants that dot the Gulf Coast. They've been dumping toxins directly into waterways, rivers, and bayous for a century now. And because of that industry and the economic benefits of having those plants there, they've been in an ironic position where to put food on their table, they've often been the ones dumping the toxins into their water, causing the health issues down the line. In addition to industrial dumping, we've also noticed the way that climate change has ramped up water issues in areas. So in Memphis, a place that at one point was known for having the cleanest and the sweetest water in all the United States because it's actually the largest U.S. city to rely 100% on groundwater, over the last two years has had multiple boil water advisories, has had water pressure issues, and even faced the threat of water contamination because climate change has led to an influx in groundwater levels. And that's something that we're going to see all throughout the country.

They are put in a difficult situation because a lot of this work is about lobbying for federal government money and going through the grant process, which makes receiving money in a small town very difficult. Once again, to use Opelousas, that has a small government. They don't have someone whose entire job is dedicated to sending in federal grant applications, versus a place like Houston or any bigger city in the South. So that makes receiving the money difficult. I definitely have seen local governments advocate for that funding, but there's still a disconnect in receiving it and then being able to use it on time. So with the billions of dollars that have been made available by the federal government over the last couple of years, there is a timeline on that. There's a time frame where the funding you receive has to be used within a decade. So even in these cities that may have received funding, they still don't have the workforce infrastructure to build out these things within time. So there are a lot of layers that make solving the crisis very difficult.

I don't think the recent ruling has too much of an impact on the specific communities that we focused on in the South. Throughout the Midwest and going towards the Northeast, yes, but these issues are deeply embedded, and the money is there. It's just about getting it in and using it in time.

The first person that comes to mind is Deborah Ramirez, who is a retired woman living in Lake Charles, Louisiana. She's been in the environmental justice fight for most of her life, even before we had those terms to call it environmental justice. She grew up in a community called Mossville, which was a historically Black freedmen's town just outside of Lake Charles that was basically wiped off the map by chemical plants over the last 50 and 60 years. And from a young age, she saw the ways that our industry, particularly the fossil fuel industry, devastated her community and all throughout Louisiana, but also contaminated her water. Over the last 40 years, she's been a very vocal advocate, calling out the different injustices that she sees. She put her own life in the face of danger. Just a couple months ago, after ringing the alarm about an environmental injustice in her community, she woke up with a brick through her window. These are different things that a lot of folks don't know about, don't think about in terms of activism, particularly in smaller rural communities. And then I met a couple in Opelousas, Eric and Mary Williams, who made the connection between gun violence and water contamination like I had mentioned to you earlier, which was something that was very unique to me and something that I think is definitely important in the ways that we frame divestment and violence in our communities, because they do overlap and they add to the harm that folks are facing.

It definitely depends on community to community. So in Lake Charles, we have seen a Black exodus from Lake Charles. A lot of that was spurred by the hurricanes of 2020 and 2021, but also the fact that it's just not that much of a livable place for folks. And we have seen warehousing industry and even chemical plants expand and buy out because of that. But in Beaumont, Texas, which is actually just over the border from Lake Charles, it's kind of been the opposite. So we've had communities that are living on the fence line of refineries who are drinking brown water that they cannot move because the value of their property has sunk so much. These are homes that at one point maybe were worth $60,000, $70,000, $80,000, that if you tried to sell them now you would get $20,000 if you were lucky. So it's kind of forced folks to stay put and accept the harm that they've been experiencing, which is obviously as an outsider looking in very difficult to understand, but people make active choices on how to live their lives with the options that are afforded to them.

That's why pollution is so pervasive, because it's something that from the moment that you experience it, it lives with you throughout the rest of your life. Whether we're thinking about air pollution or water contamination, there have been countless studies that have shown that educational outcomes decline in communities with water contamination with lead poisoning. It impacts your cognitive development, your thought process, it impacts your mood, it leads to anger. So all of these things that we associate with Black kids across the country in divested communities, sometimes it's being framed as a choice or a problem of parental guidance, when really it's the environment around us and it's a lot of these things that folks don't have control over and are not even told about, don't understand throughout their entire lives.

The first step to me, beyond learning about the issues, is just tapping into groups that you see that are doing good work. So we highlighted a couple in our reporting. Protect Our Aquifer, which is a group in Memphis, Tennessee that's been working to make sure that the groundwater source there does not get contaminated, is always looking for outside help. And we have Black Millennials for Flint, which started in Flint obviously during the Flint water crisis, but it has spread across the country. Its founder, Latrice Adams, is now on the White House's Environmental Justice Advisory Council, and they've lobbied to get federal level bills passed in regards to water contamination and lead contamination. They're also always looking for resources and support and folks to tap in across the country. But also, I think just starting at home too, and making sure that you're drinking clean water or that you have access to water filters, or your neighbors or your people that you care about, just doing little things like that at home is how these things get better at the end of the day.

Thanks for having me.