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.
Following the water plant’s shutdown, President Joe Biden signed a bill giving Jackson $600 million to make repairs. In November 2022, the Department of Justice sent a third-party manager to oversee the system’s recovery and bring the city into compliance with the Safe Drinking Water Act.
That manager, Ted Henifin, said the effort has made “amazing strides” in its first year, according to the Mississippi Free Press.
“Due to great people, we’re making great progress,” Henifin said at a press conference on Nov. 29. “In many ways, the water system is light years ahead of where it was a year ago when the (stipulated) order was signed, but we do have a long way to go.”
So far, JXN Water has stabilized the water plant’s distribution center, restored water pressure for residents, adopted a leak find-and-fix program, set up a 24-hour call center to respond to customer questions, and launched the Minority Business Enterprise project to contract local, minority-owned businesses, according to Mississippi Today.
However, residents are concerned that the city isn’t being fully transparent with them. There are some lingering questions about inflated water bills, new water rates, and bill collection rates.
Henifin proposed a new customer-billing structure that increases water bills to allow JXN Water to be self-sustaining once its federal funds are emptied, the Mississippi Free Press reports.
However, residents noted concerns about equitability.
“While I know that Mr. Henifin wants to adjust the water bill rates to make sure they’re getting sufficient revenue coming in, I think before they change the rates themselves, they need to address the most important rate, which is the collection rate,” Ward 1 City Councilman Ashby Foote said.
Jackson’s crisis has been likened to the 2014 Flint water crisis that led to more than a dozen people dying from Legionnaires’ disease and lead being leached from old pipes into residents’ water after the Michigan city switched its water supply from Lake Huron to the more corrosive water of the Flint River.
