Alabama partnership offers model for more equitable infrastructure csmonitor.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from csmonitor.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
'It can rain, it can storm': First wastewater systems installed in Black Belt via federal grant msn.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from msn.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Feb 10, 2021 The rich topsoil of Lowndes County, Alabama, was an asset in the country’s earliest decades, particularly to White landowners. Slave labor cultivated cash crops and built fortunes. An entire swath of the Southeast became known as the Black Belt for the land’s fertile hue. Today that soil is an environmental liability, and one borne by the area’s disproportionately poor and mostly Black residents. The earth is too dense and moist for conventional septic tanks. Specialized treatment systems necessary for proper sanitation are expensive. Raw sewage pools in people’s yards and seeps into gardens. For Perman Hardy, problems caused by the soil have been the focus of a decadeslong push for better wastewater management in Lowndes County. Local officials told her again and again that the available solutions were too expensive. She was already well into organizing for the 2020 election, knocking on doors and pressing people to register to vote, when Joe Biden’s presidential campaign released a plan in July calling for $2.2 trillion in spending to mitigate climate change, 40% of which would go to communities on the front lines of climate change. That kind of money would go a long way in a place like Lowndes County.
What went wrong with the vaccine rollout in Alabama and what happens next Updated on Jan 24, 2021; Published on Jan 24, 2021 Dr. Mary McIntyre, chief medical officer for the Alabama Department of Public Health, receives the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine Monday, December 21, 2020 at Baptist South Medical Center in Montgomery. (Governor s Office/Hal Yeager) Twitter Share Daphne Crocker, 73, watched the line of cars in front of her pulling away from the Daphne Civic Center. A police officer came to her window to ask if she and her 78-year-old husband had a COVID-19 vaccination appointment. She did not, because she had called and was told to just show up for a shot.