The Water Crisis

On August twenty-ninth, twenty twenty-two, the O.B. Curtis Water Treatment Plant, Jackson's largest, stopped treating drinking water. Flooding from the Pearl River had pushed a system already running on backup pumps past its failure point. Approximately one hundred fifty thousand to one hundred sixty thousand people, roughly the entire city of Jackson, were left without safe drinking water. Hospitals, fire stations, schools, and homes lost pressure. People who could leave did. People who could not stayed and boiled water and waited and wondered how long it would take.

Jackson is eighty percent Black. Twenty-five percent of its residents live below the poverty line. The infrastructure that failed in August twenty twenty-two had been failing for decades.

From twenty seventeen to twenty twenty-one, Jackson's water system recorded an average of fifty-five breaks per hundred miles of water line, nearly four times the threshold that engineers consider safe. In July twenty twenty-two, one month before the crisis, the Environmental Protection Agency completed a report documenting understaffing, high employee turnover, malfunctioning meters, and an inability to properly bill all customers. The state health department, according to a later EPA review, had failed to properly enforce water safety standards in Jackson from twenty fifteen to twenty twenty-one.

Jackson's tax base had been shrinking for decades. White flight began in the nineteen sixties and accelerated after the nineteen seventies. Wealthier residents and businesses relocated to surrounding municipalities. The suburbs, largely white, had newer infrastructure maintained with a larger tax base. Jackson, with its smaller and poorer population, was left with an aging system and declining resources to maintain it.

Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba estimated the cost of fully repairing the water system at two billion dollars. Federal assistance eventually exceeded six hundred million dollars from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and emergency grants. By mid-twenty twenty-five, the system had achieved compliance with Safe Drinking Water Act requirements for the first time in years.

The question the crisis raised, which is not an infrastructure question but a political one, is why a major American city was allowed to reach this point. The answer is not simple, but several of its components are documented and consistent.