On Thursday, Alston visited communities in the Black Belt's Butler and Lowndes counties, where residents often fall ill with ailments like E. Coli and hookworm - a disease of extreme poverty long eradicated in most parts of the U.S. - in part because they do not have consistently reliable access to clean drinking water that has not been tainted by raw sewage and other contaminants.
Aaron Thigpen, an activist who has lived in Fort Deposit for all of his 29 years, showed Alston around a Lowndes County property where five members of his extended family, including two minor children and an 18-year-old with Down syndrome, live in a modest home.
Their house, like those of many of their neighbors, discharges its raw sewage via long, aging "straight pipes" that release the effluent aboveground, where it sits in fetid open-air pools.
Their sewage runs into sparsely wooded areas or across grassy fields when it rains, spreading the waste and the pathogens it contains, generating toxic conditions, repulsive visuals and an overwhelming stench.
"These two pipes are the raw sewage pipes coming from the house. And you've got your main water line here, and it may have a hole in it, so everyone gets sick all at once," Thigpen said, pointing to exposed pipes running over a dank swamp of raw sewage.
"It's really bad when you've got a lot of kids around like there are here. They're playing ball and the ball goes into the raw sewage, and they don't know the importance of not handling sewage," he explained earlier in Butler County, where he showed Alston a rudimentary, manmade system of open-air ditches that carry effluent from homes to a nearby creek.
Speaking with a Butler County resident whose failing septic tank releases raw sewage that bubbles up into his backyard, Alston said that the unwillingness of state and local governments to help people with no access to basic services like sewage management represents a dereliction of duty.
A few weeks later, a sewage pipe spewed waste onto a heavily trafficked concoursean honest-to-God shitstorm. Im like, Literally, its raining in Penn Station, recalls Marigo Mihalos, a booking agent from New Jersey who witnessed the fecal deluge on her way to work.