MISSISSIPPI, December 30, 2022—Residents of Mississippi’s capital are ending the year unable to count on clean running water in their homes after a freezing winter storm brought a fresh crisis to Jackson’s beleaguered water infrastructure.
Residents of the majority-Black city say their main water treatment plant has been poorly maintained and funded for years. In August, its pumps failed entirely, overwhelmed by historic flooding along the Pearl River, cutting off running water entirely for Jackson’s 150,000 residents and about 30,000 people in the surrounding area.
The huge winter storm that caused chaos across the United States in the days before Christmas and killed more than 30 people in upstate New York brought unusually frigid weather to the Deep South. Other Southern cities unaccustomed to freezing weather were grappling with similar water issues, including Atlanta; Shreveport, Louisiana; and Selma, Alabama.
Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba, a Democrat, on Sunday announced once again that all residents must boil water before using it for cooking or drinking. Homes in some parts of the city had no water at all, and officials have set up distribution points for bottled drinking water each day.
The freeze caused dozens of burst pipes and other leaks, which were still being discovered as emergency crews combed the city, Lumumba said at a news briefing on Wednesday.
It would likely take until Saturday at the earliest to find and fix the leaks, restore the water pressure and perform safety tests, he said.
“I will say that that is a bit of an ambitious goal,” he said.
The latest crisis made for a glum celebration of the Christmas holiday that was already set to be Jackson’s coldest in decades.
“It was too much for me to try to cook,” said Maati Jone Primm, owner of Marshall’s Music and Book Store. “It was miserable.”
Primm, 61, said the latest crisis stemmed from decades of underfunding of the city by the majority-white state government, beginning in the 1970s when white residents began to leave the city in ever-swelling numbers. Now, more than 80% residents are Black.
Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves, a Republican, has said that the problems stem from incompetence and corruption at the local level.
Bennie Thompson represent Jackson Mississippi. Thompson is the dean of Mississippi’s congressional delegation. Thompson has represented Mississippi in Congress since 2011. He has been the only Democrat in Mississippi’s congressional delegation. His district includes most of Jackson and is the only majority-black district in the state. Thompson recently chaired the January 6th Committee to investigate the insurrection, but he has done very little to address the water crisis since 2011. Several government agencies including the U.S. Department of Agriculture has made promises to provide citizens in Jackson clean water, but the promises have turned out to be political and not delivered. The Biden’s administration has not kept its promises to provided the necessary funding to repair Jackson Water System.
Chokwe Antar Lumumba said on Twitter “We are continuing water distribution to support residents experiencing low pressure. Here are today’s distribution sites. If you are unable to make it to a site, please call 601-960-1875.”
In an earlier social media statement Chokwe Antar Lumumba provided an update on Jackson, Mississippi’s water system: “Significant amount of water being pushed out from the plant, but several leaks caused by frigid temps are causing continued low pressure. Please report any leaks by calling 311, 601-960-1111, or 601-960-1875. Crews are still working diligently.”
The U.S. Justice Department in November reached an agreement with Mississippi and the city of Jackson to appoint an interim third-party manager to stabilize the city’s drinking water supply. The Justice Department also a filed a complaint against the city on behalf of the Environmental Protection Agency over the problems.
The mayor says fixing the water system will take billions of dollars. The U.S. Congress included $600 million to repair Jackson’s water system in a spending bill signed into law last week.
After days of bone-dry faucets, Primm said she awoke on Wednesday to find that a weak water flow had been restored.
“A shower is out of the question,” the bookstore owner said, “but even a trickle is better than nothing at all.”
How White Flight Impacted Jackson, Miss.
Jackson has maintained a Black population of 80%, at a minimum, for the past decade. These statistics can be attributed to the “white flight” that occurred between the 1980s and early 2000s.
“From 1980 to 1990, the proportion of Jackson’s white population dropped from 52% to 43%. Then from 1990 to 2000, nearly 35,000 white residents left the city. Whites went from making up almost half of the city’s population to a little more than a quarter,” the Jackson Free Press reported in 2011. “The city lost 19,485 white residents from 2000 to 2010, even as it added 7,976 Black residents.”
This trend also coincides with the expansive development of surrounding counties and cities. Predominantly white cities like Flowood and Madison have exponentially grown in the past 30 years compared to the smaller-scale projects that remain incomplete in Jackson.
In addition, the largest amount of development in Jackson takes place in Fondren and the Eastover District, where many of the city’s remaining white population live.
However, in the 1950s and 1960s, many of the neighborhoods in North Jackson, West Jackson and South Jackson were all-white areas and only became mostly Black neighborhoods following patterns of white flight in subsequent decades. The white community started leaving Jackson, Miss., to start anew in other areas quickly in the early 1970s after putting up a decades-long and often-violent fight to keep Black residents out of certain areas of the city and to stop school integration.
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Source: Reuters wrote the original article.