Posted on 02/12/2021 12:39:54 PM PST by dynachrome
Sharon Smith has to plunge her toilet to get it to flush. On rainy days, wastewater spills into her yard from nearby drainage ditches. Twice in the last year her house has flooded, leaving behind the sickening smell of sewage, she said.
Her carpets are ruined, the floorboards are buckling, the bathroom wall is pulling away from the tub, she said. In the laundry room, the worst-hit part of the house, the smell of mold lingers. “I want to move, because this flooding is ridiculous,” said Smith, 59.
For decades, residents of Centreville, a nearly all-Black town of 5,000 in southern Illinois, just a 12-minute drive from downtown East St Louis, have been dealing with persistent flooding and sewage overflows. The smell of it is in the air all over town after a rain, and bits of soggy toilet paper and slicks of human waste cling to the grass in neighborhoods where children used to play on warm days, locals said. Kids don’t play outside any more. Gardens don’t grow.
Like Smith, other locals say their water tastes odd and refuse to drink from their taps, relying on donated shipments of bottled water. They worry about the long-term health effects of living under such conditions, and they say that for years elected officials and local utility companies inadequately addressed their cries for help.
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
I read the article and it's definitely #2.
Wakanda isn’t like it’s in the movies.
That’s Centralia, Pennsylvania.
“The majority of them do not know how to fix and maintain things”
*****
Wait. You mean kneeling when the US National Anthem wont fix things? You racist homes.
“This is the kind of divisional BS headline that tears this country apart.”
Man, we are already divided. Too late to hold hands and sing kumbaya.
“This is nearly literally people sh***ing in their own nests and then complaining about it.”
Concise and accurate.
Dr. S, we’re talking punch cards here...
If I recall this area depended heavily (very heavily) on speeding and code enforcement fines to fund general revenue. When those practices were rightly curtailed it left a revenue gap that can not be filled by property tax payments. If there is no money for improvements or replacements of old infrastructure what are the town fathers supposed to do?
Watch for Biden’s new policy on suburbs.The Fed will be moving them all out of that flood prone setting and moving those residents into some Chicago suburb like Cicero and Morton Grove.
You wonder also why folks of a particular race all left. Was there a general town depopulation?
They wallow in their own shit and blame white people? Don’t they run their own town ? Isn’t there a tax base?
Whatever.
Just invite a few token white people back. Problem solved ( according to this logic.)
They need a state or federal grant to update their sewage system. Get on it!
What are they going to do in a hundred years when all that’s left of Whitey moves to a Mars colony? At least that’s my dream at this point.
Not in Human Poop. Only in specific Animal Poop. I’m a Horticulturalist, and have done the trials. Human Poop is far to toxic.
I was gonna say, if there were white people left the city might have some kind of tax base to deal with the problem.
Let me know when you find Wakanda.
This should have been taken care of. Both Illinois and United States had a republican in charge pretty recently and nothing done.
I have a white liberal neighbor just like that. Nice guy, but totally inept at fixing anything. Anytime he has something break he calls me. He thinks I’m a wizard because I can put a new HDD in a computer or replace a serpentine belt. Liberal/progressives couldn’t last a month without conservatives to do the things necessary to make the country run. So why do we let them run everything? We can live without them, they can’t live without us.
I grew up near Centreville, so I know how it used to be. It was once a fairly decent town. It has had a black majority for some time. My town had a consolidated school district with Centreville and all of the black students in my high school came from there. That entire bottom land area is prone to flooding, and that goes back to the times of earliest settlement. Nearby Cahokia, the oldest existing permanent European settlement in Illinois, was an important town in French and British colonial times. One reason it never developed into something more was because of the flooding.
I haven’t been down that way for a while, but it sounds as if Centreville got caught in the same downward spiral that doomed East St. Louis — loss of business and sources of tax revenue, plunging property values, a population decrease with a high level of poverty among those who remain, increasing crime and other social pathologies, and crooked and incompetent government. Put all of those together, and it should be no surprise that the water/sewer infrastructure, among other things, has gone to pot.
As the article mentions, there will be a consolidation of Centreville with neighboring Cahokia and Alorton to form a new municipality of Cahokia Heights. All three of the towns suffer from the same problems and are having trouble making it on their own, but I don’t see how this is going to help, except in the sense that “misery loves company.”
If water has no way to leave it stays until it does.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.