Dacia Torchia tries to avoid her basement. Especially when the foul, familiar smell creeps under the door just off the kitchen. She knows what’s waiting for her at the bottom of the dark stairway.
“I’m in a state of denial. Like if I don’t go downstairs, I don’t have to deal with it,” said Torchia, 55, a single mother who owns a century-old house at the bottom of a hill in Mount Vernon, New York. After heavy rains, her basement sometimes floods with dark, sludgy wastewater – 8in on bad days.
Torchia isn’t alone. Like many residents in Mount Vernon, she is unclear about whether underlying weaknesses in her plumbing are her problem alone, or whether the city bears some responsibility. Over the years, she said, four private plumbers have diagnosed different causes for her sanitation woes. But their suggested fixes were all too expensive. Instead Torchia opts for cheaper, temporary measures – and then braces herself until the next flood.
This majority-Black town on the outskirts of New York City has a long history of sewage problems. Until recently, Mount Vernon has said it can’t afford to fix the infrastructure failures that are polluting rivers and flooding homes. The situation was symbolic, experts said, of how many lower-income or Black communities are locked in a vicious cycle: they lack basic municipal infrastructure and are unable to pay for the problems that result. They are precisely the kind of community that the Biden administration had said would benefit from sweeping infrastructure and wastewater investments.
But officials in Mount Vernon now say they’re optimistic about the city’s sewage crisis. Damani Bush, the city’s public works commissioner, said the Guardian’s reporting last year “set fire” to the case, and helped draw renewed state and federal interest in solving the city’s sanitation problems.
After a series of meetings with environmental oversight agencies, the city has unlocked $10m in grant funding that would target areas where its pipes are known to be leaking sewage into the environment. Officials called it the biggest grant the city has received in recent memory.
“I think the sky is starting to clear a little bit,” said Mount Vernon Mayor Shawyn Patterson-Howard. “It’s not a full sunny day yet. We have a long way to go.”
The money is a start – it’s still only a fraction of the help Mount Vernon needs. What’s left to be seen is how much the grant helps, and how long before families like the Tochias can expect to see relief.
A long time coming
Located in Westchester county, just north of New York City, Mount Vernon sits next door to some of the wealthiest enclaves in the US. The county’s median household income was more than $100,000 in 2019, versus less than $60,000 for Mount Vernon. Mount Vernon also has the most Black residents of any city in Westchester; in the mid-20th century, thousands of Black residents who had been displaced from surrounding cities through urban renewal policies settled in Mount Vernon, which today has a population of 74,000.
Nearly a decade ago, the federal Environmental Protection Agency discovered that untreated human waste from Mount Vernon was spilling into the Bronx and Hutchinson Rivers, which border the city and flow south toward the Bronx. Twice, once in 2014 and then again in 2016, the agency ordered Mount Vernon to address the overflows, but the city failed to comply. In 2020, the EPA – together with the state of New York – sued Mount Vernon.
City officials estimate that overhauling Mount Vernon’s crumbling sewage infrastructure could cost between $100mand $200m. City officials also are still determining the scope of the problem, and estimate that about 1,000 households are vulnerable to sewage backups. Some residents say they’ve had problems flushing their toilets for decades.
Last summer, the New York state Department of Environmental Conservation began working with the city to help unlock funding for infrastructure fixes, according to Bush. In December, the agency awarded the city a $10m grant to fix two sewage outfalls along the Hutchinson River, where local environmental researchers have recorded off-the-charts levels of fecal bacteria.
The city still needs more funding, manpower and equipment to completely satisfy all the orders. But officials say the grant signals a new phase of the sewage crisis, where oversight agencies work with the city instead of punishing it.
“The water infrastructure challenges confronting Mount Vernon are simply enormous,” said DEC Commissioner Basil Seggos, who is listed as one of the parties suing Mount Vernon over its sewage pollution. He says state regulators plan to collaborate with Mount Vernon on solutions moving forward.
No shortcuts
As the city continues to lobby for cash assistance, ithas had to find temporary fixes to stop homes from flooding.
About a year ago, it installed a bypass pump in the middle of a busy street in a densely populated neighborhood. The device, which runs 16 hours a day, looks like an oversized power generator hooked up to an open manhole, and the smell of sewage is strong. Residents hate walking near it. But if it stops working, hundreds of nearby families would immediately notice problems with their plumbing, city officials said.
Last year, Mount Vernon’s six-man sewer crew responded to hundreds of emergency backups, while also performing court-ordered repairs. “We’ve completed more work in the last eight months than we have in the last 10 years,” said Bush, who has served as public works commissioner since 2020.
But his crew keeps finding new weak points in the system as they try to fix old ones. “Every street has its own problem. It’s a lot,” Bush added.
Cities can bounce back from catastrophic infrastructure failures – it’s happened before. The combined sewer network in Washington DC once discharged a staggering amount of untreated waste into the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers with every rain. In 2005, the city agreed to install massive tunnels deep underground that would reduce overflows by 96%. The project, one of the largest of its kind, is still under construction, 16 years later. The cost: $2.7bn and counting. Yet the effort earned DC good marks for wastewater in June, when the American Society of Civil Engineers last evaluated the city’s infrastructure.
Mount Vernon’s sewage network services just 4.4 sq miles, a fraction of Washington DC’s footprint. And the historic $1.2tn bipartisan infrastructure package could bring significant relief to the city’s ailing pipes: This year, the EPA will direct $428m for water and sewage infrastructure into New York state’s drinking water and clean water state revolving funds. The EPA has promised to give priority to under-resourced cities, as part of the plan. The agency says it already has been working with Mount Vernon on its sewage crisis and will continue to seek new solutions, despite its litigation with the city.
New York Senator Chuck Schumer, a proponent of the infrastructure package, has advocated on behalf of Mount Vernon in Washington and said through a spokesperson that he will help funding flow toward the city.
“Senator Schumer will continue to work in lockstep with his federal, state and local partners to ensure the funding he secured gets to Mount Vernon and will continue to fight for more until the city has the sewer system they’ve long desired and deserved,” said Schumer spokesperson Allison Biasotti.
Commissioner Bush said he’ll continue lobbying agencies at every level of government to make sure Mount Vernon gets “its fair share of the pie” from the infrastructure package. The city badly needs funding for roads and bridges – sewage is hardly the only problem area, Bush noted.
“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” he said. “If we don’t go for this now, there won’t be another shot.”
