At 76, Patricia Greenwood has given up on trying to name whatever now grows in the yard. It isn’t grass, she said. That died many floods ago and never returned.
The water in her kitchen has never run clear in her memory. Even the dog refuses to drink it.
She is one of many Cahokia Heights, Illinois, residents whose homes have repeatedly flooded with sewage and feces for as long as four decades.
“Mentally, it’s horrible,” Greenwood said.
Earlier this year, a bottle filled with water from her tap glowed under an ultraviolet light — lit with signs of sewage contamination after it was tested by a coalition of legal advocates and volunteers. It confirmed what three generations in her family home had already suspected.
Her dread has only deepened since Congress dropped over $67 million for sewer projects across southern Illinois where she lives. The Trump administration has also moved to cut key water and wastewater funds, leaving hundreds of thousands of Black residents nationwide trapped between contaminated water, flooded streets, and a vanishing federal lifeline.
The result, advocates argue, is a pattern in which the federal government will document the crisis, take legal action, and even occasionally announce new aid, but then repeatedly fails to sustain the funding, enforce timelines, or hold state and local power brokers to account when they let Black residents keep living in human waste.
Community-organized testing of dozens of homes in Cahokia Heights documented E. coli and chronically low chlorine in kitchen taps in the Black Illinois city, which was deemed the poorest town in America in 2018.
E. coli is found in water that contains sewage or human and animal waste. Ingesting it can lead to severe stomach cramps, diarrhea, vomiting, and dehydration, with risks of even more serious illnesses for children, the elderly, and those with weakened immune systems. Cahokia Heights is home to double the amount of children under 10 years old than the U.S. average.
“It destroys you,” Greenwood said.
The average resident makes just about $16,000 per year, but the water bill for the drinking water that is making them sick still comes, and, soon, it may be higher if a proposed rate increase passes.
“It makes you want to go postal because you pay your bill, you do what you’re supposed to do when you’re supposed to do it, and then you’re constantly getting slapped in the face for doing what’s right,” Greenwood added.
There are tens of millions of Americans who rely on wastewater systems that regularly violate federal clean water standards. Studies show Black people are more likely to live in the neighborhoods with water and sewage systems that consistently fail and see episodes of contamination. These systems also take longer than systems in white communities to come back into compliance. As a result, Black folks are more susceptible to kidney, heart, and brain damage, as well as to waterborne diseases once believed to be eradicated in the U.S. like hookworm.
After publication, Illinois EPA said it “takes all water quality concerns seriously” and, in response to the latest community testing, collected samples on March 18 from 24 locations across Cahokia Heights. According to the agency, those samples all showed adequate chlorine and tested negative for coliform and E. coli, and officials are now seeking permission to re-test inside the specific homes flagged by residents, with those results set to “inform the Agency’s next steps.”
At the same time, Illinois EPA stressed that both the city and the water company are already required to conduct routine bacteriological sampling that has consistently met state standards, a reassurance that stands in sharp contrast to what residents say they see and smell coming out of their taps.
Black communities lose funding to fix water issues
In Greenwood’s neighborhood, known as the “ping pong” section of the town — where a narrow road once lined with modest houses now feels like a country lane dotted with boarded-up homes and open ditches — residents said the waiting between storms is the worst part. They know the rain will send sewage into their yards and through their pipes.
She is tired of having to explain to her special-needs son that he can’t sit in the yard “like he used to and watching [her] husband plant seeds all year just to watch nothing grow.”
For decades, federal agencies and elected officials have cycled through promises, piecemeal grants, and legal settlements in Cahokia Heights without ever delivering the full-scale overhaul they know is needed. Residents said this has effectively normalized sewage and now E. coli as facts of daily life.
“I got a feeling they don’t care if we’re flooded out of here,” said Sharon Smith, a 64-year-old lifelong resident. “It ain’t right what they’re doing to us.”
The Illinois EPA has documented hazardous sewage contamination in the town’s ditches and streets since at least the 1990s. The agency often relied on the city to make the necessary changes, without guarantees of funding support. As funds did arrive, there have been documented incidents of local officials mismanaging or diverting infrastructure funds, rather than servicing residents whose homes were flooding.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency also took years to seriously consider the town for major mitigation money and structured grants. In 2021, the agency declined to offer funding to the community.
However, in 2024, Cahokia Heights agreed to $30 million in fixes for its sewage system through a consent decree filed between the U.S. Department of Justice, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the city. Little improvement has been made so far.
In 2024, resident Yvette Lyles told Capital B she believed she and her neighbors would “be dead before this is resolved.”
She has lived in the area for decades and has twice been infected with Helicobacter pylori, a bacterium that’s more common in developing countries with poor sanitation.
Then came that $1.1 million cut in funding from the Trump administration. The cut is a part of a repeal of a Biden administration priority to divert funding through Clean Water Act settlements to fix systems in “disadvantaged” communities.
Regardless of race or social class, “if there’s a perception that the water isn’t safe, these multibillion‑dollar water corporations and the government have an onus to make people feel safe, because they pay their bills. Everyone deserves that,” said Kennedy Moehrs Gardner, who is a staff attorney with Equity Legal Services.
Equity Legal Services has spent years organizing Cahokia Heights residents, documenting flooding and sewage in homes, and filing federal lawsuits under the Clean Water Act to force the city and utilities to stop illegal discharges and repair neglected sewer and stormwater systems. The group also partnered with scientists and local organizations to support the community-led water testing.
The work is difficult under the Trump administration, Moehrs Gardner said. 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 majority-Black Alabama counties where many residents must pipe sewage from their homes onto their own property because there is no system in place to receive it. In Thomasville, Georgia, the EPA canceled a $20 million grant that was meant to address aging sewer lines in historically Black neighborhoods.
The impacts are documented. In Shaw, Mississippi, a low-income, predominantly Black community where heavy rains also routinely push sewage back into people’s homes, more than half of the town’s kids reported having gastrointestinal illnesses, including intestinal parasites such as hookworm and high rates of gut inflammation.
Still, even in best case scenarios, the government has historically failed to address these woes in a timely manner. Infrastructure projects typically work on a timeline that looks more like a childhood than an election cycle.
In Flint, Michigan, it took close to a decade after the water crisis for large federal grants and court‑ordered plans to translate into lead pipe replacement and slow declines in contamination at the tap. And in Kansas City, Missouri, a federal consent decree launched in 2010 committed the city to spend about $2.5 billion over 25 years to overhaul its sewer system. The program has already delivered dozens of major projects and measurable reductions in sewer overflows, but full compliance has been pushed out toward 2040 to keep the costs even remotely affordable for ratepayers.
A city questions if anyone cares about their health
According to Equity Legal Services, 118 water samples were taken in Cahokia Heights. Twenty-six tested positive for coliform and eight others were contaminated with E.coli.
Residents and volunteers worked with Washington University scientists to design an EPA-style sampling protocol, using Color Alert testing kits to look for bacterial contamination in tap water. They collected samples monthly from homes over seven months, and when a test came back positive, they returned within 24 hours to take confirmatory “upstream” and “downstream” samples from nearby houses, sending one bottle from each site to a certified lab and another to a community lab where residents incubated the samples and checked for E. coli under UV light.
Elin Warn Betanzo, a former U.S. EPA employee who worked to uncover the Flint water crisis, provided technical support for the community water testing. She said local officials “need to believe the E. coli results.”
“We found it more than once. It was not a fluke,” she said.
Last year, she was removed from an EPA drinking water advisory council for criticizing the Trump administration.
Cahokia Heights’ water provider insists everything “meets standards.” Cahokia Heights city attorney Erica Spitzig said the city investigated the water complaints and did not identify an issue within its system.
In a statement, Illinois American Water said the company “follows approved regulatory protocols to sample and test our water routinely, in Cahokia Heights and everywhere in Illinois that we serve, and meets or surpasses all bacterial water quality standards set by the Illinois EPA and U.S. EPA.”
In response, Moehrs Gardner said, “It’s interesting that [Illinois American Water] says, ‘There’s nothing wrong with our system, our water is fine,’ when we’re not able to point to any data that they’ve replaced all the pipes or addressed the infrastructure issue and people are still getting sick.”
The water company pointed to the fact that the town’s water issues are traced back to sewage issues that are handled by the local government. The situation has highlighted, as experts have long pointed out, the fragmented governmental process that requires city, county, state, and federal partners to work in tandem with private companies across infrastructure projects.
For Cahokia Heights resident Arianna Norris-Landry, she cares less about who is at fault and more about who will fix it. The most devastating part is watching the impacts on the elderly and young children.
“It just needs to be fixed,” she said. “I’m 65 this year. I know a lot of people my age that are living here, that own their house like I do, and can’t afford to move.”
“And the kids, I’ve seen impacts on them, mentally and physically,” she added. “We’re seeing birth effects in this city, all the same defects from newborns to people aged 81, so that’s how long it’s been going on.
“That’s how long they haven’t given a damn about anybody that lives here.”
Read More:
- The Water Crisis Is Disrupting Black Americans’ Lives
- The Sewage Crisis Drowning America’s Poorest Town
- Rural Alabamians Lived With Poop-Filled Water for Decades. Trump Just Killed Plans For Relief.
This story has been updated.