You work very hard to have a home.
And having consistent sewage problems,
it really impacts my quality of life and oddly my sense of self-worth.
Homeowners in Mount Vernon are now demanding action claiming the town's ageing sewer system
is falling apart.
It's a 100-year-old system so over the years, you know, with a lot of wear and
tear and increasing the population, it's at its breaking point.
A stretch of homes in Mount Vernon
getting flooded by the nasty mess that's bubbling up from the ground.
Residents are worried about their health and desperately begging for a fix.
The fact that Mount Vernon is a predominantly black town
and the median income level is so much lower than the rest of Westchester, that's not a coincidence.
So this is the basement, it had been a plan or goal to finish this at one point
and then we discovered these sewage problems.
So happy Sunday.
This is what the basement looks like, that bubbling there is water coming up out of the sewer.
You can't see it in here now, but these sinks will fill with sludge.
You'll see faeces in it.
It's just gross.
Actually you can still see a little bit here that I didn't get.
This is sewage. This I cleaned very well, this I'm just noticing. Ew.
When sewage has been backing up, I have to say don't do laundry, don't run the dishwasher,
don't take a shower ...
So having to adjust our lives to this problem is really, you know, everybody's
flexible, everybody's trying to, you know, be a team member, but it's really, it's hard to ask people not
to flush the toilet.
There's been times where it hasn't been bad and there's been times where it's
really bad like right now and we've had a ton of issues this year, like, how many times did you say
you've had the plumber here? Five times this year?
Probably. – Probably, yeah.
People come from around the world to see New York City and go to Times Square,
but little do they know that within 20 minutes of New York, they'll see homes there they have
raw sewage running back into their basements that was a shock to me.
So in terms of the scale of this and how prevalent it is in this country,
we're just starting to find out, that's why we call it America's dirty secret.
This is pretty much the damage.
I think that it's been such a persistent problem for a variety of reasons.
I have heard that there are sewage problems in the infrastructure of Mount Vernon.
My name is Damani Bush,
I'm from the city of Mount Vernon and I'm the DPW commissioner.
So right now, we're heading to
Lincoln Avenue in Howard Street, where we actually had one of our sanitary lines collapsed.
The entire street was undermined and we had businesses and residents in the area who were experiencing
sewer backups into their homes.
So a few months ago this would actually overflow
with raw sewage from all the homes coming from this way and this area.
It would stop right here and literally just start overflowing directly out the manhole and running onto the street and
running in whatever way it could.
This is a typical problem throughout the city of Mount Vernon
because, like I said, the system is over 100 years old, it's virtual fire clay pipe and
over the years, you know, with the wear and tear of it and the increased population, it just collapses
and it breaks down.
It's a big problem that we're having, but we are addressing it, you know,
it's kind of hard because it's like playing whack-a-mole, you know, where we're fixing one problem and then
another problem pops up.
We're doing the best we can with what we have as we only have five
guys on our sewer crew and we're responsible for 100 miles of sewers throughout the city so that
alone is difficult.
So the sewer infrastructure is in the state that it's in in Mount Vernon
for two reasons.
The number one reason is pure neglect.
There was just this lack of reinvestment
into proper equipment, personnel manpower to actually maintain the system.
Now the volcano has erupted and everything is just breaking all at once.
And the second problem is of course funding.
Today mayor Shawyn Patterson-Howard welcomed the vice chair of the White House environmental
justice advisory council to view the situation first hand.
Catherine Coleman Flowers.
I have spoken with the mayor of Mount Vernon, residents, Mount Vernon representatives from Mount Vernon
on the state and local level and is very clear: without federal intervention and federal help,
they will not be able to fix the problem.
That's indicative of these issues across the nation
where years and years of kicking the can down the road has led us to crisis.
These repair jobs are not simple because it's hard to determine exactly what's going on beneath the streets.
Like, for instance, we did a project on South Third Avenue and Sanford Boulevard and at
first it seemed like a simple undermine, where it was about an eight by eight foot patch,
but what happened was when we actually started excavating and the entire street was collapsed.
The only thing that was holding the street up was two concrete slabs that were joined together.
So beneath those two concrete slabs, everything was washed out,
it was hollow, it was one of our main streets
in the city where our second largest school is located, so at any given moment a school bus could have
been driving over and the street would have just literally collapsed.
So for instance, that simple thing where we thought it could have cost us maybe $20,000 for, you know,
a two-day/three-day job, it ended up costing us $500,000 and this is just one street.
According to the American Society of Civil Engineers with sanitation, the US is given a D+.
That's not good.
Then we have another factor which is mother nature.
Whenever there's any rainfall,
even though we have a separate storm system from our sanitary lines, it just starts to back up,
going back into the actual city.
So right now, you know, we're going to have definitely our guys working tonight.
As we get these deluges of rain due to climate change, it makes the problem more extreme.
A system that's been failing for many years and the residents, they've been suffering for years now.
This was my office, I've repurposed it because I didn't want my computers and
equipment down here anymore.
Family pictures, pictures of my four kids and
important papers and other, you know, cards and things like that and, yeah, those boxes got
just decimated.
It's very difficult, I mean, I'm still dealing with this stuff
and a lot of things are just going to go in the garbage at this point, but I'm trying to
preserve those things that can't be replaced like pictures from before the digital times.
The emotional toll that I've noticed at take on my mom is, she's a single mom, she works full-time,
she has four kids and she's expected to deal with this, like, to equate it, it feels like a like a third or
fourth job that she has.
It's pretty demoralizing in some ways, especially because we don't really
have the financial wherewithal to deal with it on a persistent basis and it's really taxing
in that way.
Dealing with this on a regular basis, it's depressing and it brings on this feeling of
helplessness.
I have spoken to the city about the problem.
I just had someone come in last week from
the sewage department and again say, 'this is on your side, this is not our problem'.
That is hard to believe because so many people in Mount Vernon are having this problem.
Maybe this is going a little off topic but I don't feel like if this were, you know, one mile away from here,
it would be brushed off in the same way as it is in Mount Vernon which is a town with a majority
black population.
The people that bear the brunt of infrastructure problems in the United States
are generally people of color and poor people.
Why? Because they're people of color and poor people.
I've seen this in rural communities, I've seen this in poor communities but now, I'm seeing it among
people that are middle class but the one thing they have in common is that they're marginalized
and they're generally people of color.
The mayor hopes to convince federal and state officials to
provide not only manpower but also financing for a comprehensive overhaul of a system plagued with problems.
A repair job that could easily cost more than the city's annual $122m budget.
Right now, the ideal solution is to bring in the experts, put together a comprehensive plan for
the overall system.
Once we have that in place and we have the reporting and the data to back it up,
then we can go to our partners in the state and our federal partners and say, look,
we need this amount of money to help us fix this problem because
we just can't do it in-house.
This is millions and millions of dollars
that the city just doesn't have, so we're going to need that additional funding on the federal level
to help us fix the problems.
Federal funding from President Biden's newly signed infrastructure deal
could make a big impact here in the Hudson Valley.
City leaders in Mount Vernon are hoping
they'll get their fair share of funding.
In the case of Mount Vernon, I hope that
they're one of the places that's selected to get funded to deal with this infrastructure problem
because without dealing with it, I think we're creating a potential public health crisis that
we can prevent.
The US is actually the wealthiest country in the world and this should not happen here.
I would like a permanent solution, I would like sewage not to be part of my daily fear factor.