Patricia Greenwood, 76, has given up on naming things growing in her garden. That’s not grass, she said. It died in a flood many times ago and never returned.
The water in the kitchen has never been clean in her memory. The dog also refuses to drink.
She is one of many residents of Cahokia Heights, Illinois, whose homes have been repeatedly flooded with sewage and feces for 40 years.
“Mentally it’s terrible,” Greenwood said.
Earlier this year, a bottle containing water from her tap glowed under ultraviolet light and was inspected by a coalition of legal advocates and volunteers, showing signs of sewage contamination. It confirmed what three generations of her family had already suspected.
Her fears have only deepened since the Legislature spent more than $67 million on sewer projects across southern Illinois, where she lives. The Trump administration is also moving to cut key water and wastewater funds, leaving hundreds of thousands of Black residents across the country trapped between contaminated water, flooded roads, and defunct federal lifelines.
The result, advocates say, is a pattern in which the federal government documents the crisis, takes legal action, and in some cases announces new aid, but repeatedly fails to maintain funding, meet deadlines, or hold accountable the state and local power brokers who keep Black residents living in human waste.
In Black Illinois, which was ranked the poorest town in America in 2018, community-organized testing of dozens of homes in Cahokia Heights found E. coli and chronically low chlorine levels in kitchen faucets.
E. coli is present in water, including sewage and human and animal waste. Ingestion can cause severe abdominal pain, diarrhea, vomiting, and dehydration, and children, the elderly, and people with weakened immune systems are at risk of more severe illness. Cahokia Heights is home to twice the number of children under 10 as the U.S. average.
“It destroys you,” Greenwood said.
Although the average resident earns only about $16,000 a year, the drinking water bill that causes illness is still accruing and could soon become even higher if proposed rate increases are passed.
“You’re paying your bills and doing what you’re supposed to do when you’re supposed to do it, and you’re always getting slapped in the face for doing the right thing, so it makes you want to go to the mail,” Greenwood added.
Residents of Cahokia Heights, Illinois, are resorting to using boats to navigate the sewage-filled floodwaters that flood their neighborhood after heavy rains. (Courtesy of Centerville Citizens for Change)
Tens of millions of Americans rely on wastewater systems that regularly violate federal clean water standards. Studies have shown that Black people are more likely to live in areas where water and wastewater systems are consistently broken and contaminated. These systems take longer to regain compliance than those in white communities. As a result, black people are more susceptible to kidney, heart and brain damage, as well as waterborne diseases such as hookworm, which was once believed to have been eradicated in the United States.
The Illinois Environmental Protection Agency did not respond to a request for comment at the time of publication.
Black communities lose funding to solve water problems
In the Greenwood neighborhood, known as the city’s “Ping Pong” district, where narrow streets once lined with modest homes now resemble country lanes dotted with boarded-up houses and open ditches, residents said waiting between storms was the worst part. They know that when it rains, sewage flows into their yards and pipes.
She’s tired of having to explain to her special needs son that he can’t “sit in the garden like he used to and watch (her) husband plant seeds all year long just to watch nothing grow.”
For decades, federal agencies and elected officials have made promises, incremental grants, and legal settlements on the Cahokia Plateau, but never delivered on the overhaul they know is needed. Residents said this effectively normalized sewage and E. coli, making it a fact of everyday life.
“I felt like they didn’t care that we were being flooded out of here,” said Sharon Smith, 64, a lifelong resident. “What they are doing to us is not right.”
The Illinois Department of Environmental Protection has documented harmful sewage contamination in the town’s gutters and roads since at least the 1990s. The agency had no guarantee of funding and often relied on the city to make necessary changes. While funds have indeed arrived, there have been documented incidents of local authorities mismanaging or diverting infrastructure funds rather than providing services to residents whose homes have been flooded.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency also took years to seriously consider large-scale mitigation funds and structured grants to the town. In 2021, authorities denied funding to the community.
However, in 2024, Cahokia Heights agreed to pay $30 million to renovate its sewer system through a consent decree filed between the U.S. Department of Justice, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the city. So far, there has been little improvement.
In 2024, resident Yvette Lyles told Capital B she believed she and her neighbors “will die before this problem is resolved.”
She has lived in the area for decades and has twice been infected with Helicobacter pylori, a bacterium that is more common in developing countries with poor sanitation.
That was followed by a $1.1 million funding cut from the Trump administration. The cuts are part of the repeal of the Biden administration’s priority of diverting funds through Clean Water Act settlements to repair systems in “disadvantaged” communities.
Regardless of race or social class, “if there is a perception that water is not safe, then multibillion-dollar water companies and governments have a responsibility to make people feel safe because they are paying the bills. Everyone has the right to do that,” said Kennedy Maurice Gardner, a staff attorney at Equity Legal Services.
Equity Legal Services has spent years organizing Cahokia Heights residents, documenting residential flooding and sewage, and filing federal lawsuits under the Clean Water Act to force the city and utilities to stop illegal discharges and repair abandoned sewer and stormwater systems. The group also partnered with scientists and local organizations to support community-led water quality testing.
Mose Gardner said the effort is difficult under the Trump administration. President Donald Trump has cut hundreds of millions of dollars meant to improve water systems in disadvantaged communities. This includes $14 million to install septic systems in Alabama’s majority-black counties, where many residents must pipe sewage from their homes to their properties because the county does not have a system in place to receive sewage. In Thomasville, Georgia, the EPA canceled a $20 million grant aimed at addressing aging sewer systems in historically black neighborhoods.
The impact is documented. In Shaw, Mississippi, a predominantly black, low-income community where heavy rains routinely cause sewage to back up into homes, more than half of the town’s children reported suffering from intestinal parasites such as hookworms and gastrointestinal illnesses, including high rates of enteritis.
But even in the best-case scenario, governments have historically failed to address these issues in a timely manner. Infrastructure projects typically work on timelines closer to childhood than election cycles.
In Flint, Michigan, it took nearly a decade after the water crisis for a large federal grant and court-ordered program to lead to the replacement of lead pipes and a gradual reduction in faucet contamination. And in Kansas City, Missouri, a federal consent decree enacted in 2010 committed the city to spending about $2.5 billion over 25 years to overhaul its sewer system. The program has already delivered dozens of large-scale projects that measurably reduced sewer flooding, but full compliance is being pushed toward 2040 to keep costs a little more affordable for ratepayers.
Residents clean up around a flooded ditch in Cahokia Heights. (Courtesy of Centerville Citizens for Change)
City asks if anyone is concerned about their health
According to Equity Legal Services, 118 water samples were taken in Cahokia Heights. Twenty-six people tested positive for coliform bacteria, and eight others were contaminated with E. coli.
Residents and volunteers worked with scientists at the University of Washington to design an EPA-style sampling protocol and use Color Alert test kits to test for bacterial contamination in tap water. They collected samples from each home every month for seven months, returning within 24 hours of a positive test to take confirmatory “upstream” and “downstream” samples from nearby homes, sending one bottle from each site to an accredited laboratory and one to a local lab, where residents incubated the samples and tested them for E. coli under ultraviolet light.
Erin Warne Betanzo, a former U.S. EPA official who helped uncover Flint’s water crisis, provided technical assistance with local water testing. She said local authorities “need to believe in the E. coli results.”
“We found it over and over again. It wasn’t a fluke,” she said.
She was removed from the EPA Drinking Water Advisory Committee last year for criticizing the Trump administration.
Cahokia Heights’ water supplier insists everything is “up to code.” Cahokia Heights City Attorney Erica Spitzig said the city investigated water complaints but could not identify any problems within the system.
Illinois American Water said in a statement that the company “regularly samples and tests water in Cahokia Heights and all of the Illinois locations we serve in accordance with approved regulatory protocols and meets or exceeds all bacterial water quality standards set by the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.”
In response, Morse Gardner said, “It’s interesting that (Illinois American Water) can’t show any data that they’ve replaced all the pipes or addressed the infrastructure issues, yet they’re saying, ‘There’s nothing wrong with our system, our water is fine,’ and people are still getting sick.”
The water company pointed to the fact that the town’s water problems can be traced back to sewage problems handled by the municipality. As experts have long noted, this situation highlights the fragmented government process that requires city, county, state and federal partners to work hand-in-hand with private companies across infrastructure projects.
Arianna Norris Landry, who lives in Cahokia Heights, is less concerned about who is at fault and more concerned about who will fix it. Most devastatingly, we are seeing the effects on the elderly and young children.
“It just needs to be fixed,” she said. “I’m turning 65 this year, and I know a lot of people my age who live here and own their homes like me and can’t afford to move.”
“And the children, I’ve seen them affected mentally and physically,” she added. “We’re seeing the effects of childbirth in this city, the same deficiencies from newborns to 81-year-olds, but it’s just how long it’s been going on.
“For that long, they didn’t care about the people who lived here.”
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