Cahokia Heights, Illinois — For most people, a glass of water and a rainy day is harmless and even comforting. For Early Few, those are unforgettable memories.
When a storm is forecast for southern Illinois, he knows he has to prepare for the possibility that his block will once again turn into a lake, cut off from the road and engulfing the basement he’s rebuilt so many times.
When water first came to his home in 1993, he remembers opening the front door before dawn, preparing lunch for an early shift at an auto repair shop, and stepping into the brown water that reached his car window.
At that time he was already in his fifties. In my 60s, I realized that the water seeping into my house was full of sewage.
At age 85, he has watched the same floodwaters come over and over again, tearing through five basement walls, seven hot water tanks, five furnaces, and bathroom tiles and a bathtub that nearly sank through wet floorboards.
“I’m the first to flood and the last to come out,” he said, standing on a moldy floor the night after a brief rain storm in April, looking down at his flooded basement. “At this point, I stopped trying to fix things.”
On the Cahokia Plateau, the average person earns about $20,000 a year and a typical home is worth less than $45,000. Hughes estimates he has spent nearly $200,000 on repairs since the first flood.
When he turns on the tap, the murky river eerily resembles the water pooling around him. A recent inspection revealed sewage residue and human urine flowing out of the faucet. Bottled water became his most indispensable companion.
“The city and county always knew, but as far as they were concerned, we didn’t matter until we had lawyers and did all this,” Hughes said of his community, which is more than 70 percent black. St. Clair County, where the town is located, is 60% white.
Early Few’s basement flooded after a brief rain storm in April. (Adam Mahoney/Capital B)
The Illinois Environmental Protection Agency has documented harmful sewage pollution in the area since at least 1989.
Now, with federal agencies ending funding mandates for towns this year and the Trump administration cutting programs that would have directed Clean Water Act money to places like this, the prospect of change feels out of reach for some residents.
From Cahokia Heights to the Black Belt of Alabama to the back roads of Mississippi, Black communities are not only being asked to live with sewage and unsafe water, they are being asked to sacrifice their mental and physical health to prove it.
“If white people are affected, something needs to be done,” Hughes said. “But when it’s black people, it’s like we don’t exist.”
A case of water bottles sits on the soggy floor of Hughes. (Adam Mahoney/Capital B)
When there is not enough evidence to access safe water
Yvette Lyles said the hardest part is knowing the crisis is real and feeling like no one in power believes in her. Lack of interest is etched not only in the ruined basement, but also on the bodies of its inhabitants. Lyles, who has been in the hospital for years related to bacterial infections, said the pain is now psychological: “It’s very discouraging…It’s like a slap in the face.”
In order for someone to believe what they were experiencing, the residents of Cahokia Heights had to become scientists and researchers. He documented every flood that turned streets into “little rivers,” organized seven months of water sampling in his own kitchen to mimic the federal testing process, and worked with experts at Washington University in St. Louis and scientists who helped unravel the Flint water crisis to identify E. coli and low chlorine in tap water.
When the community presented its evidence earlier this year, Illinois American Water, the area’s drinking water provider, questioned its testing protocols and insisted the water met “standards.” The Illinois Environmental Protection Agency promoted its own testing using a variety of metrics.
People here talk about the fear that accompanies every drop of rain, the embarrassment of constantly throwing out waterlogged belongings but not being able to afford to replace them, and constantly calculating whether it is safe to let children drink water from the tap.
“I feel like it’s a waste to keep spending money on a house and living like that,” says Fuse, who stopped doing house repairs about 10 years ago. It is this level of alarm that public health experts associate with “weathering,” or the premature aging of Black bodies due to the chronic stress of racism and neglect.
Hughes was lucky to live to be 85 years old. The average life expectancy in the region he calls home is just 68 years, more than a decade lower than the average life expectancy in the United States of 79 years.
Public health researcher Kamala Phyllis Jones describes racism not as “an individual character flaw or an individual moral flaw,” but as “a system of power that constructs opportunity and assigns value based on appearance.” She argues that the system “unfairly disadvantages some communities, unfairly benefits others, and disempowers entire societies by wasting human resources.”
In Cahokia Heights, this has been measured in basements flooded with sewage, and most people living there are not expected to survive that long.
That’s why doctors “can’t just tell patients to eat better,” she says. “We need to understand the context of where they live and… the social determinants of their health.”
Cahokia Heights’ sewage crisis began with decades of neglect and aging sewer infrastructure, with pipes not being properly maintained, allowing raw sewage to routinely overflow into streets, yards and homes after heavy rains. Similar failures occurred in sanitary and stormwater systems, and sewage-laden flood waters began to seep into cracked and poorly maintained pipes and mains. This allows bacteria such as E. coli and H. pylori to travel through the distribution system and appear in your kitchen faucet.
Lyles, 67, has been diagnosed with Helicobacter pylori five times in the 32 years he has lived in his Cahokia Heights home. H. pylori is spread through contact with feces in food or water, infecting the stomach. Studies have linked long-term infection with H. pylori to an increased risk of developing gastrointestinal cancer.
She is one of 80 families in Cahokia Heights who rely on donated bottled water through an ongoing community water drive sponsored by Equity Legal Services, a law firm that has been at the forefront of bringing this crisis to the state and national level.
A health survey is underway in the region focused on tracking H. pylori infections and enteritis, and the 2022 and 2023 health surveys found that 30 out of approximately 50 residents tested had active H. pylori infection.
Lyles underwent surgery for a bacterial infection.
“We cannot do this to our people,” she said. “We can’t take away what they need, which is clean water. We can’t stand by and watch the rest of us get sick and die.”
Yvette Lyles also said the water crisis has divided the city between those who speak out and those who don’t. (Adam Mahoney/Capital B)
“We are aware of recent media reports suggesting that our Cahokia Heights customers may have detected contaminants in their drinking water supplies through unofficial testing,” Illinois American Water said after community-initiated testing detected fecal bacteria in household faucets. The company said it “sampled and tested the water in accordance with approved regulatory protocols and the water meets or exceeds all bacterial water quality standards.”
Residents were angered by the framing of the testing protocol, backed by former federal water officials, as “unofficial” and inaccurate.
Aided by a walker, Lyles explained to Capital B how she and her neighbors carefully collected water samples for seven months, following federal protocols: “There were no errors in the way we collected the water and the way it was processed and sent to the lab. And we double-checked.”
Lyles said that dismissal is as ingrained in her body as any other pollutant. Years of neglect and “lazy action” by authorities as residents plead for help have left people unable to speak out about what is happening in their homes for fear of reprisal. “Some people are afraid to come forward and talk because they don’t want to feel retaliated against or face backlash for speaking out about what’s going on,” she says. Fear, anger, and fatigue live with her medical records, shaping how she sleeps and who and how she trusts those around her.
“The bodies are intertwined with the water pipes,” she says. If you ignore either, the other will eventually fail.
Now she has stopped expecting Illinois American Water to “do the right thing” or expecting sympathy from City Hall.
“Personally, I don’t trust Illinois American Water, I don’t trust the EPA, and I definitely don’t trust our local politicians,” Lyles said. “If the water is brown and you feel sick, can you trust them?”
Above: A flooded road in Cahokia Heights, Illinois. Below: A home on the Cahokia Plateau. (Adam Mahoney/Capital B)
Scotese Clark, a 26-year-old struggling to stay in the community, said the water situation reinforces the idea that “they don’t care about the people here” that has long permeated the town’s psyche.
Throughout his life, he has seen people “abandon” their communities. Since 2000, one in four residents has left the area. “They’re showing us that they don’t want us to be here,” he says.
In a sense, this reality is built into the city. The Cahokia Plateau was built on low-lying wetland land, connecting several small, resource-starved towns together without the necessary infrastructure to protect it from its nature. Sewer and stormwater systems are too poorly wired and have too little capacity, as heavy rainfall in the region has increased by 25% since 1970.
Every time there is heavy rain, the same flaws are exposed. There is nowhere for water and waste to end up other than flowing into people’s streets, basements, and now water supplies.
Clark said he understands the effects of climate change, but Cahokia Plateau residents “should be given the opportunity to fight to remain” and young people “should be shown that people care about their survival.”
Scotts Clark stands in front of a donated water bottle. (Adam Mahoney/Capital B)
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