Water troubles in Jackson, Mississippi, still linger more than a year after a crisis ensued that left more than 150,000 people without safe drinking water as the city works to overhaul its water systems completely and sustainably.
The issues stem largely from the sudden shutdown of the city’s largest water treatment plant in August 2022, which occurred after floodwaters overwhelmed the plant system. The resulting crisis left several schools, hospitals, fire stations, and many homes without safe drinking water. Approximately 153,000 residents had no potable water or water pressure to flush toilets. Many communities were even left without water service altogether in a city that’s population is 80 percent Black.
However, the system’s failure wasn’t totally unprecedented. Years of neglect on the part of city and state officials to maintain Jackson’s failing infrastructure reportedly gave rise to the crisis.
In 2012, a federal consent decree declared that the city violated the Clean Water Act after the EPA discovered that Jackson had at least 2,300 unauthorized sanitary sewer overflows over a five-year period. That year, an American Water Works Association journal found Jackson’s pipeline repair needs were more than nine times higher than the national average for similarly sized systems. The federal government ordered the city to pay a civil penalty and draft a phased approach for evaluation and rehabilitation.
That master plan was released in 2013 and found that more than 112 miles of water pipes were still unlined cast iron and, in many cases, the eroding pipes were a century old. The distribution system had also been degrading since 1997 and was on the brink of a system failure. These discoveries necessitated $600 million for repairs, according to officials.
In the years after, winter storms and freezes caused water outages and burst pipes around the city and billions of gallons of sewage was dumped into the Pearl River….
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