ALAMO, TX — Hi, my name is Andrea. I’m 16 years old and I live in a community called South Tower Estates. In this community, we have a serious problem. This problem is a bad smell. I never really knew where it came from or what caused it until this past summer. Through our organization, ARISE, we participated in several trainings on social and environmental justice. Josué Ramirez, the Lower Rio Grande Valley Co-Director of Texas Low-Income Housing Information Service, gave us a presentation on environmental justice. With that information, Imma De Stefanis, RSCJ and Reyna Gonzalez, RSCJ from the Stuart Center, helped us develop our plan to make a change in our community.
In our trainings with Mr. Ramirez, we learned basic information, such as what was causing the smell and where it came from. The odor is caused by an open lagoon wastewater treatment plant that we have in our community. This plant is over 65 years old, and it runs on solar panels. Because the plant is an open lagoon style plant, the smell of sewage radiates out to the surrounding communities, like mine. Through our trainings, we learned there are 14 colonias [little Mexico] affected by the smell in all. We also discovered that the waste that is treated at the plant is not even ours — it comes from the city of Alamo!
We started to understand our problem as an effect of environmental racism. Just because we are a low-income community doesn’t mean we have to live with this smell. After we had gotten all the information we needed, we took the next step: to go to our community and pass out flyers so that people are aware and know where the smell is coming from.
We also went to talk to the Commissioner’s Court of the City of Alamo, and met with Precinct 2 of Hidalgo County. We have encouraged residents to record odor logs whenever they experience the smell so they can report it to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) so that the organization would come and investigate to see if the plant was violating its permit. We have also learned the difference between the plant we have, an open lagoon plant, and a mechanical plant. The mechanical plant actually helps decrease the smell and is a more effective plant. We hope that our next big step is to get a mechanical plant and make a big impact on our community.
