Jackson’s main water treatment plant fails leaving residents of Mississippi’s largest city without running water indefinitely

A dire water crisis is continuing to unfold in Jackson, the capital and most populous city in Mississippi, after a recent bout of torrential rainfall and subsequent flooding brought its already-frail water system, including its main water treatment plant, to the brink of failure. As a result, 150,000-some residents will be without reliable running water for drinking, cooking, and other basic needs for the foreseeable future as officials scramble to bring the city-run O.B. Curtis Water Treatment Plant, which treats more than 50 million gallons per day, back online.

Even before floodwaters from the Pearl River breached the aging facility this past weekend and tipped a slow-rolling, decades-in-the-making infrastructural nightmare well over the edge, the city had been under a boil-water notice for a month. As reported by Reuters, the motors powering facility’s primary pumps had already recently failed, and the plant was operating on backup pumps when the floodwater-induced failure occurred on Monday. (In terms of its larger impact, the flooding was less severe than initially feared.) In 2021, a severe ice storm also left many Jackson residents without running water for weeks on end.

Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba laid blame on understaffing at the facility and a “set of accumulated problems based on deferred maintenance that has not taken place over decades.”

“It was not a matter of if our system would fail, but a matter of when,” the BBC reported Lumumba as saying.

Lumumba declared a water system emergency on Monday while Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves requested an emergency federal declaration for the water crisis the following day. The White House swiftly approved the emergency declaration, setting into action federal assistance to supplement state-based efforts. Meanwhile, schools, businesses, and other services across the city have been shuttered indefinitely while bottled water and non-potable water for toilet flushing is trucked in and distributed to residents, which Reeves referred to as a “massively complex logistical task.”

“Until it is fixed, it means we do not have reliable running water at scale,” Reeves said during a press conference on Monday. “It means the city cannot produce enough water to fight fires, to reliably flush toilets, and to meet other critical needs.”

The crisis has not only underscored a rift between Lumumba, a Democrat first elected in 2017, and Mississippi’s Republican-led government (the mayor was notably not invited to Reeves’s Monday evening press conference on the unfolding situation), but also further brought light to the disinvestment and infrastructural neglect that has plagued Jackson, a predominately Black city, for years.

Famed for its role in the national Civil Rights movement and positioned on the southern border of the Mississippi Delta, Jackson has long struggled with poverty, crime, and a shrinking population. The overwhelmed city government has done all in its power to make headway but lacks the resources—i.e. outside funding—it needs to take on myriad pressing challenges. Last year, the Republican state legislature thwarted two separate bills that sought funding to repair the city’s outdated, failure-prone water infrastructure. (A full modernization of the system is estimated to cost at least $1 billion.)  In 2020, bipartisan legislation was introduced that would have helped residents pay overdue water bills and, in turn, help to boost city coffers. As NPR pointed out, the legislation was vetoed by Reeves.

Meanwhile, as state senator David Blount pointed out to the New York Times, the state itself is in a relatively healthy place in terms of finances thanks in part to federal stimulus funds; per Blount, the state has $2.5 billion in the bank, some of which could be used to chip away at pressing infrastructural needs in its capital city. The state government, however, has not demonstrated the appetite to do so.

“This problem has been building for a decade, and it’s past time to fix it,” Blount relayed to the Times. “The basic question is, can Democrats and Republicans, Black folks and white folks, come together and find a solution and fix it?”

Visit the Community Foundation For Mississippi to learn more about how you can help those impacted by the Jackson water crisis.