Black communities face dangerous clean water and environmental risks
Clean water is essential to life. However, the climate crisis, outdated water infrastructure and damaging environmental policies from the Trump administration potentially could lead to disastrous health and home crises in African American communities.
Around the country, deteriorating municipal water infrastructure has a devastating effect, particularly on African American women and children. Bottle-fed infants, who consume mostly formula mixed with tap water, can ingest high levels of lead. As a result, African American children are three times more likely than white children to have elevated blood lead levels.
The leaching of lead from pipes in Flint, Mich., not only caused contamination of residential tap water, but it had profound consequences on the health of the city’s African American women and babies. Studies have raised concerns that the exposure of Flint’s residents, who are more than 50 percent black, may have impacted fertility, fetal development, infant health and contributed to learning disabilities among children.
Flint is an example of a man-made disaster. Climate change and natural disasters also can disproportionately impact communities of color.
Black women were among the worst affected by Hurricane Katrina and the flooding that followed. Even before the storm, 37 percent of black women and girls in New Orleans were living in poverty, compared to just 9.5 percent of white women and girls. When Katrina struck New Orleans, these women made up 80 percent of the people unable to evacuate the city before the storm. Research showed that the experience of trauma, instability and extreme loss by these women and girls resulted in long-term chronic stress, depression, anxiety, and on-going post-traumatic stress disorder.
Americans depend on a functioning water infrastructure to bring them clean drinking water and commonsense policies that protect the wetlands that absorb floodwaters and filter pollution and keep local rivers and lakes safe for their families to enjoy. Yet in many regions of the country, communities are served by outdated systems, some more than 100 years old. In Philadelphia, water pipes installed before the Civil War are still in use. Pipes, treatment facilities and storage facilities have exceeded their intended lifespans and are breaking down.
Climate change is adding further stress to our water systems. Instead of action to strengthen protections for clean water, the federal government has reduced water-related spending in recent decades and rolled back Clean Water Act protections for many vital bodies of water.
The Black Women’s Health Imperative is part of the Clean Water for All Coalition — a broad coalition of environmental, health, equity-focused, conservation, sportsmen and community groups — that is working to advance policy solutions to help tackle America’s water infrastructure crisis and improve the health of our communities, especially low-income and African American communities… [Learn More]