For 30 years, residents of Centreville, Illinois, have been forced to live with pools of their own feces. Nearly every time it rains in the town, where 96 percent of the residents are Black, raw sewage bubbles up from the ground like a crappier version of the oil-spewing scene from the Beverly Hillbillies. When the streets flood, as they do multiple times a year, neighbors have to take out boats to navigate poop-filled waters. Afterward, soggy toilet paper bits hang from shrubs like Christmas lights.
It’s not like residents haven’t tried to get the problem fixed. Earlie Fuse has lived in Centreville for 29 years. In that time, the 80-year-old says he has spent thousands of dollars to protect his family from the encroaching waste, replacing multiple walls that have collapsed under the weight of water damage. His basement, once a place for entertaining guests, is now an uninhabitable mud den. As a member of Centreville Citizens for Change, a group of residents demanding solutions to the flooding in the area, he and fellow resident Cornelius Bennett filed a lawsuit against the city government of Centreville. The lawsuit alleges that the city is legal... Read more
