Jackson, Mississippi. How Can a City’s Taps Run Dry?

The city experienced a loss of pressure after a pump failure at its water treatment plant.

Crews install a temporary pump at the O.B. Curtis Water Treatment Plant in Jackson, Miss. Picture from the Mississippi Governor’s office.

The taps in Jackson, Miss., are gushing water once again, to the great relief of the 150,000 residents who since August 29 have not had water to drink, bathe or cook with.

Following torrential rainfall, the Pearl River reached a high-water mark and flooded the already damaged O.B. Curtis Water Treatment Plant. The plant could then pump only 30 million gallons of water a day, instead of its usual 50 million gallons, and the entire city lost water pressure and water stopped flowing to residents.

You don’t hear much about the Pearl River—its 444 miles of length dwarfed as it is by the Mississippi River, flowing from the heart of the state, through Jackson, before it dumps into the Gulf of Mexico, just 20 miles East of New Orleans.

Jackson, Mississippi’s capital and the state’s second largest metropolitan area, has a population that is 80 percent black, with a quarter of the residents living in poverty. The population is declining faster than any other U.S. city—from 174,000 in 2010 to 154,000 in 2020 based on U.S. Census data.

It’s not the first water crisis for the beleaguered residents of Jackson. They went weeks without water after storms in February 2021 that knocked out the water treatment plant. A month before the recent floods, the city issued a boil water notice when water turned cloudy, possibly due to “disease-causing organisms.”

More than 25,000 people lost their water supply after deadly floods in eastern Kentucky in July 2022 broke water lines and inundated entire neighborhoods.

Extreme heat and drought made the ground shift, resulting in an unusually high number of water main breaks in Fort Worth this summer.

“Through 8 a.m. Monday, Fort Worth Water had 476 main breaks in 2022, with 221 of those in the past 90 days,” reported the Texas Government office on July 18, 2022. “The telling number is the 182 in the last 30 days—over 38% of the yearly total.”

America’s aging treatment plants and decades-old pipes can crumple under the shocks of a warming world, according to the New York Times.

“There’s a crisis at hand,” said Mikhail V. Chester, a professor of civil, environmental and sustainable engineering at Arizona State University. “The climate is simply changing too fast, relative to how quickly we could change our infrastructure.”

But also to blame are municipalities with an eroding tax base that find themselves unable to maintain services like water, electricity, Internet and so on—services taken for granted in more affluent areas.

Remember Flint, Mich., which in 2014 released brown water—tainted with lead—from its taps? Once home to GM, Flint suffered from and never recovered from the plants’ closings. It was chronicled by Michael Moore in the documentary Roger and Me.

Water infrastructure is being addressed by President Joe Biden, who signed the trillion-dollar Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) with funds flowing from the Clean Water and Drinking Water State Revolving Funds.[i]

The water crisis in Jackson has been a wake-up call for cities everywhere since so many also have deferred maintenance on their own water infrastructure systems.

Recent extreme weather events have alarm bells ringing for scientists and engineers, who predict that more of these catastrophes are on the way. Flash floods, wildfires and hurricanes are bad enough, but now we have to worry about a lack of clean, safe drinking water?

A water main breaks every two minutes and an estimated 6 billion gallons of treated water is lost each day in the U.S.—enough to fill over 9,000 swimming pools, according to the ASCE 2021 Report Card for America’s infrastructure.

Jackson’s O.B. Curtis Water Treatment Plant installed a temporary pump and for a few days pumped an additional 4 million gallons daily but was then shut down due to a “chemical imbalance,” according to Engineering News-Record (ENR).

Jackson’s problems are going to take a billion dollars to fix, said Jackson’s Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba at a press conference.