Photo: Ivan Bandura / Unsplash

The Bottle by the Sink

Some mornings before she opens her eyes, Carletta Davis thinks about a sunny day three decades ago when the city of Prichard was united in pride. She was a sophomore on the Vigor High School girls basketball team, one of the best in the state, boarding a Greyhound bus to play for the championship. Cheering parents thrust ten-dollar bills through the windows. Community leaders handed bouquets through the door. The bus pulled away and the whole city was behind them.

Then the alarm rings. Davis pulls herself out of bed and walks to the bathroom sink. She does not turn on the faucet. Like everyone she knows in Prichard, she reaches for the bottle of clean water she bought at the store, pours some onto her toothbrush, brushes her teeth. She has been buying her water for years. The water from the tap sometimes comes out in drops. Sometimes it comes out murky, with a sulfuric smell she describes to people who have never been to Prichard by telling them to imagine eggs boiling on the stove with no water in the pot. Sometimes it does not come out at all. Her water bill, when it arrives, is $300 to $400 — for bathing, she says. Just bathing. Because the drinking water comes from the grocery store.

Prichard sits on the Gulf Coast just north of Mobile, a majority-Black city of about 19,000 people with a median income around $32,000. It borders Africatown, the historic community founded by formerly enslaved West Africans who arrived on the Clotilda, the last known slave ship to reach American shores. When the Clotilda was discovered in 2019, the national media descended on the area to celebrate the find. They drove through Prichard to get there. They did not stop to ask about the water.

Davis is a former banker. She now leads We Matter Eight Mile Community Association, a local environmental justice organization. She won a $500,000 grant to fund advocacy work. She met with EPA officials. She was building relationships with federal agencies, applying for a second grant, making the kind of institutional progress that takes years of patient work. Then, on November 5, 2024, everything changed. The new administration took office, issued an executive order ending what it called "radical and wasteful government DEI programs," and the grants — the EPA technical assistance, the university research funding, the infrastructure applications — either died in process or were rescinded.

She ran for city council in 2025. The water still smells like eggs.

The System That Eats Itself

The numbers tell the story of a system consuming itself. Since 2021, over 50 million gallons of raw sewage have spilled from the Prichard Water Works & Sewer Board's infrastructure into local streets, creeks, and waterways. In 2022 alone, Prichard spilled 18.7 million gallons — more than seven times the total spillage reported by every utility in neighboring Baldwin County combined. In 2023, the figure was 4.5 million gallons in a single May weekend. Sixty percent of the drinking water that enters the system leaks from the pipes before it reaches a customer's faucet. The Alabama Department of Environmental Management describes the service lines as "very poor" and in "dire shape." Testing has confirmed the presence of bacteria and chronic inadequate disinfection since 2021.

Read that again. Worse than Flint.

The governance collapse is the first link in the causal chain. The Prichard Water Works & Sewer Board was a politically appointed body with no requirement that its members have professional water utility experience. For decades, it operated without strategic planning, financial discipline, or accountability. In 2019, the board borrowed $55.7 million through a bond issuance managed by Synovus Bank. By 2023, it had defaulted on the bond, dipped into the reserve fund to make required payments, and run the utility out of cash. Former board manager Nia Bradley was charged by Mobile County prosecutors with theft of property in the first degree and aggravated theft by deception — more than $3 million in credit card purchases including trips to New York and Chicago, items from Louis Vuitton and Gucci, and streaming service subscriptions. Other employees were arrested on similar charges.

That's the mechanism. A politically appointed board with no expertise mismanaged a public utility for decades, defaulted on its debt, stole from the system, failed to complete the paperwork required for federal funding, and left 19,000 residents with contaminated water, sky-high bills, and sewage in their streets. The receivership is the intervention. But the damage — physical, financial, and institutional — was thirty years in the making.

The second link is the fiscal trap. Prichard's population has been declining since the 1960s, driven by white flight and the annexation of a substantial portion of its tax base by neighboring Mobile. Fewer residents means fewer ratepayers. Fewer ratepayers means less revenue. Less revenue means less maintenance. Less maintenance means more leaks. More leaks mean higher costs per unit of water delivered, which means higher bills for the customers who remain. The system eats itself: the people who stay pay more for less, and the infrastructure that serves them deteriorates faster because there aren't enough of them to fund its upkeep.

So we're threatening to condemn people's homes because the water system that serves them is broken — and calling that a solution.

The July 2024 master plan recommended that Mobile Area Water & Sewer System (MAWSS) take over ownership and operation of the Prichard system. MAWSS already sells water to Prichard. It has the operational capacity, creditworthiness, and institutional infrastructure to access the low-interest loans needed for a multi-hundred-million-dollar rebuild. But the takeover requires state legislative approval, and MAWSS had previously stated it had no desire to absorb the troubled system. As of 2025, the receiver has applied for nearly $50 million in additional state and federal funding, including $15 million pending with the EPA and $34 million in new grant applications from ADEM. Whether those applications will survive the current federal funding environment is uncertain.

The Map That Doesn't Move

Prichard belongs to a category that researchers and advocates have named but that policymakers have not adequately addressed: majority-Black Southern municipalities with water infrastructure built for a larger, wealthier, whiter population that no longer exists. The pattern is visible in Jackson, Mississippi, where the water system failed catastrophically in 2022 after years of deferred maintenance and population loss. It is visible in Flint, Michigan, where emergency management decisions led to lead contamination. It is visible in Lowndes County, Alabama — just three hours north of Prichard — where the absence of sewer infrastructure forced residents to live with raw sewage in their yards, and where a historic environmental justice settlement secured $26 million in federal funding that was subsequently frozen under the current administration's DEI executive order.

The mechanism across these cases is consistent. A municipality's tax base contracts through population loss, white flight, or annexation by neighboring jurisdictions. Infrastructure maintenance is deferred because the revenue isn't there. The deferred maintenance accumulates into systemic failure. Federal and state funding — which could break the cycle — requires financial audits, grant applications, and institutional capacity that the cash-strapped municipality cannot produce. The system fails not because the community doesn't want clean water, but because the governance and fiscal structure that is supposed to deliver it has been hollowed out by the same forces that hollowed out the population.

What makes Prichard's case particularly stark is the proximity to celebration. When the Clotilda was discovered in the waters near Africatown, the media, the historians, and the government showed up. Prichard — which borders Africatown, which shares its history, which is home to many of the same families — got none of that attention. Mobile Baykeeper noted the contrast directly: everyone wants to celebrate the finding of the Clotilda, but they "seem content to sweep the water woes of Prichard under the rug." The historical injustice that brought enslaved Africans to this shore is commemorated. The environmental injustice that poisons their descendants' water is not.

Notice what the map shows. The communities with the worst water infrastructure in America are not scattered randomly. They cluster in majority-Black municipalities in the Deep South and the Rust Belt — places where population loss, white flight, and the fiscal consequences of segregation have compounded over decades into infrastructure that cannot sustain the people who remain. Prichard. Jackson. Flint. Lowndes County. The map doesn't move. The crisis doesn't move. The funding that could fix it keeps getting rescinded.

Alternative Explanations