Amal Bakchan is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Civil, Coastal, and Environmental Engineering at the University of South Alabama. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. Amal's research couples engineering modelling approaches with qualitative analysis methods to gain new insights into socio-technical water-sector infrastructure systems. Her work seeks to improve access to basic services in underserved communities in the US and developing nations. Amal is currently working on decentralized wastewater management in the rural Alabama’s Black Belt region, primarily advancing knowledge on responsible management entities’ characteristics, as well as socio-technical challenges to achieving equitable wastewater services in these communities.

Due to extreme (non-perc) soil conditions, the rural Alabama’s Black Belt region is characterized as a wastewater crisis. The shrink-swell clays (vertisols)—the most common surface soils in this region—prevents infiltration of effluent and consequently causes hydraulic failure in conventional septic onsite systems (e.g., septic tank drainfield). While ongoing research efforts are investigating decentralized clustered wastewater systems as promising cost-effective technological solutions to the wastewater challenges in these communities, how to best manage these small systems is largely unknown. If improperly managed, decentralized systems do not provide the level of treatment necessary to adequately protect public health and water quality. As such, establishing a responsible management entity (RME) that conducts the operation and maintenance (O&M) is needed to ensure more reliable system performance. As a prerequisite to identifying adequate RMEs, this study (1) explores possible socio-technical barriers—spanning the technical, financial, regulatory/institutional, social, and environmental dimensions—that may hinder effective decentralized wastewater management; and (2) assesses the impacts of these barriers on the RMEs’ operations in the Black Belt. The study is enabled by a survey questionnaire administered to various public and private entities (e.g., water and sewer service providers), operating across various states in the US. Using binomial logistic regression, preliminary results indicate that a public entity is less likely to consider operating and managing decentralized clustered wastewater systems. Additionally, results show that the financial barriers are the most influential to the RMEs’ consideration to provide O&M services to these systems. For example, the “community’s limited financial capacity to pay for O&M services” is a highly rated barrier by the respondents. As such, to further support the urgent need for decentralized wastewater management in rural, underserved communities, federal and state policy needs to address gaps in these systems’ funding. Building off of this empirical understanding to the socio-technical barriers, the study contributes to practice by highlighting policy areas that could best overcome the concerning barriers, thereby contributing to addressing the wastewater issues in the rural, underserved Black Belt’s communities.