Slowly but surely, Americans believe climate and environmental change are real. We see the effects of it in our neighborhoods and communities. But it took awhile. Perhaps that is part of the reason that our nation has ignored public infrastructure for so long, leading to a dirty water crisis.
A public health crisis in the city of Jackson, Mississippi, began on August 29, 2022, after the Pearl River flooded due to severe storms. The primary water treatment plant suffered a system failure and left over 150,000 residents without clean drinking water and/or water pressure to flush toilets. The next day, President Biden declared a state of emergency, authorizing federal funds to cover 75% of all costs related to the crisis.
Since 2012, Jackson has been under consent decrees for violating both the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Clean Water Act. The city has experienced breaches in the outdated sewer system that have resulted in more than 2,300 violations alone.
This means that during heavy rains the system overflows, causing hundreds of millions of gallons of raw sewage to spill into the Pearl River each year. In 2022, 230 million gallons of sewage spilled into the river. The spills occur so often that officials have stopped issuing alerts to warn citizens against swimming or fishing in the river. The sewage finds its way into people’s bathrooms and kitchens, making the water unsafe to cook with and bathe in. No one deserves to live like that.
In July 2023, the city appointed an “independent” third-party water manager, Ted Henifin. Henifin is the only officer of the new sewer system and reports directly to a judge who oversees the entire process. Needless to say, few improvements have been made. The question is: Why have they declared Jackson’s water is safe to drink while the Mississippi Department of Health says it’s not?
The majority-Black population of Jackson has been in desperate need of improvements to the city’s water infrastructure for decades, but the city is unable to access federal relief funds because of obstacles set up by the Mississippi State Legislature. The city does not have access to the funds to cover operations, maintenance, or repairs. Worse, states have the authority to redirect funding away from communities with the most need and allocate them to more affluent communities. In other words, Black communities are suffering.
The water crisis in Jackson is not over because systemic racism still exists. In 1970, Jackson’s schools began integrating and the population began to decline. Many white families left for the suburbs, also known as “white flight,” leaving less revenue to maintain the infrastructure. Middle-class Black people also moved out to avoid urban decay and rising crime. State and federal spending never made up the difference. Jackson’s population is more than 80 percent Black and the poverty level is nearly 25 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. When it comes to water scarcity and contamination, Black communities are most vulnerable.
Honestly, I don’t think we realize how deeply ingrained racism is in all of our structures and systems, including infrastructure. We don’t act enough on the intersection between Black people and environmental justice. Any community that is suffering from lack of infrastructure maintenance is dealing with the same problem, maybe just on a different scale. But across the nation, with poor communities that are often Black, Brown, and Indigenous, we see the same thing happening over and over again.
Funds have been made available by the federal government over the last couple of years, but the funding has not made it to the communities that need it most. The funds must be bypassed from state-level control and prioritized to those communities that are experiencing racially driven environmental injustice to ensure the availability of clean water to everyone.
The water crisis in Flint, Michigan, showed the country what Black communities have known for years about the under-investment in water infrastructure in their neighborhoods. Jackson is slowly making changes, but this crisis put a spotlight on the infrastructure and environmental inequities that affect communities across the United States. To ensure access to clean water, they city has to invest in infrastructure maintenance and repairs.
More than a year after the city’s water system was placed under the control of a third-party manager, they seem confident that the system will withstand upcoming below-freezing temperatures. Prior storms in 2018 and 2022 left most residents without water. Since then, steps have been taken, including building structures around the water plant’s central filtration system. Jackson’s water lines remain weak. Henifin had planned to start replacing the over 100 miles of small diameter pipes this past summer, but the project got pushed back to this year. He estimates it could take anywhere from five to 10 years to finish.
Jackson, Mississippi, highlights the failures of federal legislation including the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Clean Water Act to protect communities — especially as they navigate neglect by state authorities. We would be remiss to believe that this couldn’t happen in any city across the United States. Unless these processes are fundamentally changed to center state accountability and community oversight, they will continue to punish the victims.
