In Fall 2022, students in the School of Journalism and New Media’s Jour 456 class decided that rather than complete the usual coursework, they wanted to do in-depth on what was happening in Jackson. The class researched the story on campus, identified communities in Jackson, and then traveled there to report in person. For the Spring semester, Sophia von Seebach continued reporting and wrote the final article. Rabira Moore, Joseph Rogers, HG Biggs and Sophia Jaramillo contributed reporting. 

Access to clean and reliable water — a basic human necessity–  has been taken from the people of Jackson, Miss.. However, to say that the Jackson water system’s most recent failure was the first in its history would be misleading. The Jackson water system has been facing substantial problems stemming from a lack of infrastructure maintenance for generations.

Mississippi’s capital city’s issues with its water infrastructure existed long before Gov. Tate Reeves ended his emergency order, instated on August 30, 2022  in November 2022. Reeves issued the order after two pumps from the O.B. Curtis Water Treatment Plant underwent repairs due to the flooding of the Pearl River, resulting in week-long water boil notices and loss of water pressure.

The water treatment pump failure caused more than 150,000 Jackson residents to lose water pressure, forcing them to rely on potable or bottled water for weeks. Those whose water pressure remained intact faced an onslaught of boil water notices. 

Some political, educational and environmental experts believe Jackson’s infrastructure first began to suffer in response to white-flight in the 1970s, which took tax revenue out of the city and into its surrounding suburbs. 

“It is a civil rights story,” Robert Luckett, a historian and associate professor at Jackson State University, said. “I think we have to go back to 1970 because I think that’s really the root of the story, because 1970 is when desegregation comes to public schools.

Luckett said that when the schools desegregated in 1969 and 1970, 40% of the student population was gone overnight. And over time, as private schools opened in Jackson’s disproportionately white suburbs, white families moved to those suburbs as well leaving Jackson with fewer residents and less tax revenue to pay for administration of municipal services. Many businesses and professional groups followed those residents out of Jackson, diminishing tax revenue and city funds even further.

“If you think about who the white parents are in Jackson, the state capital, who are withdrawing their students, their children en masse from the public schools, it’s the hierarchy,” Luckett said. “It’s the white leadership of the state. It’s the political, economic and religious leaders of the state. And it’s in that moment that the state of Mississippi begins divesting from its capital city.”

What began as a racial issue has also become an economic and political discussion, Luckett said. 

“There’s been this increasingly antagonistic relationship between the white hierarchy and leadership of the state and what has become the black capital city, and one of the blackest major American cities that there is.”

Luckett has lived in Jackson for 14 years and has experienced numerous system failures there. 

“There was a hard freeze and we had no water in the city of Jackson for like three weeks in January of 2010.”

According to Luckett, the system failure last year did not only impact accessibility to water; it also had economic ramifications.

“I’m on the school board in Jackson. We have to shut down schools. A hundred percent of our students are on free breakfast and free lunch. Those two meals a day are essential for those children in our community,” Luckett said. “Parents who lose jobs because they’re in the service sector where (businesses close because) there is no water, they can’t now pay rent and there’s an eviction problem. So there are a lot of other things that come with a water crisis beyond being able to take a shower, flush a toilet and drink clean water.”

Ralph Eubanks is an author, journalist and faculty fellow at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. His work focuses on race, identity and the culture of the American South. Eubanks agrees that Jackson is an example of modern political racism. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Jackson is a majority-minority city, with 82.8% of its population being Black. 

“The message (is) that substandard access to water is all that Black people deserve to have. … That Jim Crow standard seems to be what the state government of Mississippi is saying to the people of Jackson, that that is all you deserve,” Eubanks said. “It doesn’t have to work; it doesn’t have to be clean. There’s no real standard for it, and that’s exactly how it worked during Jim Crow.”

Moreover, Eubanks said, this neglect is dangerous to the health and well-being of Jackson residents.

 “Someone is going to die from lack of access to water, and the water is brown,” he said. “It is Black death, or it is really long-term health and potentially cognitive problems that will come up for people who drink this water that is unsafe.” 

Stephanie Otts, the director of the National Sea Grant Law Center and an expert on federal environmental laws, such as the Clean Water Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act, said that water scarcity is not the only concern facing Jackson. 

From 2018 to 2020, Otts led a group through Mississippi to test water samples. The purpose of this study was to ascertain to what extent there are levels of lead in drinking water that should prompt remedial action by households or assistance from public health experts. 

According to Otts, the Safe Drinking Water Act, a law passed by Congress in 1974, with amendments in 1986 and 1996, to ensure safe drinking water for the public, created The Lead and Copper Rule, which stipulates that any water sample with trace amounts of lead amounting to 15 parts per billion is non-compliant. 

“Lead is a very potent neurotoxin and so we know that there is no safe level of lead exposure,” Otts said.

Although Jackson has been in compliance with Environmental Protection Agency regulations since 2017, this does not mean that lead is no longer detectable. Otts said that during her study of Mississippi water, a number of samples from Jackson contained some levels of lead.

“Probably two-thirds of our samples had detectable levels of lead,” Otts said.

Otts said that trace levels of lead are scarcely discussed because the city is only required to report the 90th percentile of their findings. This means that if less than 10 percent of the city’s water samples are above the action level, 15 parts per billion, there is no requirement to publicly disclose those figures. 

“The big gap, from my perspective, on the law and policy side is that the way the Lead and Copper Rule works can mask high risks in individual homes. That nobody knows because the cities aren’t required to tell anybody but the homeowner,” Otts said. 

According to Otts, this presents a greater risk for developing children. 

“Early exposure to lead can result in neurological impacts, such as ADHD, which can lead to learning challenges that might impact performance in schools,” Otts said.

Water is a public health necessity with economic and social ramifications, according to Otts.

“There have been statements and declarations from the United Nations that say access to clean water should be included in the other things that we think of as human rights,” Otts said. “From a law policy perspective, governments should be providing clean water access to their citizens as part of the services that they generally provide.” 

Introduced in 2021, Mississippi Senate bill SB 2822 inhibited the Jackson water system repairs by requiring a dollar-for-dollar match from Mississippi cities for any funds that come from the Mississippi Municipality and County Water and Wastewater Infrastructure and the federal American Rescue Plan Act of 2021. In April 2022, SB 2822 was signed into law by Gov. Tate Reeves and Jackson, one of the poorest cities in the country, has not been able to meet this monetary match.

De’keither Stamps, a Democrat who represents the 66th District in the state House of Representatives, agreed that Jackson water has been perpetually problematic. 

“I know a lot of people are struggling in the past couple weeks with water, but it’s been an issue for decades,” he said.

Prior to becoming a state representative in 2020, Stamps served on the Jackson City Council for seven years. 

“The first responsibility of the utility is the entity who’s in charge of the utility,” Stamps said. “I wouldn’t just shift it over to the state, because the city, it bills its own customers, its own rates, it determines the problems. Even when the state has a little bit of responsibility, the primary responsibility are the folks who have been in charge of it forever.”

Stamps said that the city had multiple opportunities over the years to reallocate local funding toward municipal needs, such as water and sewage maintenance. Furthermore, Stamps said, some efforts that were made by the city, particularly the Siemens Inc. contract, had negative impacts on the city’s infrastructure and its ability to run basic municipal departments. 

In 2013, Jackson engaged Siemens to upgrade city sewer lines and water-treatment plants and to install an automated water-sewer billing system. The cost was to be $90 million with the expectation that the upgrades would save the city millions more.

However, after the new system was installed, residents reported not receiving bills – sometimes for years – or receiving extraordinarily high bills, which many did not pay. Unpaid balances totaled more than $40 million, according to the city’s public works department, forcing the city to tap other funds and take out loans to make water-sewer repairs.

Siemens settled a lawsuit with the city of Jackson in February 2020 for $90 million, which was approximately the price of the original contract. 

A class-action lawsuit filed against Siemens on Sept. 16, 2022, claims the faulty water meters cost the city approximately $175 million and otherwise adversely impacted the city’s ability to allocate necessary resources.

“The city operates and bills its customers to run a utility. These are basic funding opportunities that they have missed out because the city has disinvested from all public works departments and chosen a strategy of using contractors all the time. Those are decisions that the city made,” Stamps said. “Your cash flow is your ability to perform.”

The lack of local and state funding has made maintaining, repairing and replacing the water and sewer systems a very tenuous job and has made the system vulnerable to a wide array of problems.

 “We deal with boil water notices on a daily basis, as a way of life,” Stamps said. 

Because of political — and some say racial — differences, the state Legislature and the Jackson City Council have not been able to work collaboratively on a permanent solution to the water problem.

 “We’re hurting the state’s economy with polarizing politics and divisive rhetoric, and all those things, it doesn’t move the state forward,” Stamps said.

Neither the office of Gov. Reeves nor the office of Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba responded to requests for comments.

Jesse Holland, an award-winning legal and government reporter, author, educator and University of Mississippi alumnus, said that legislation may not be the only divisive factor at play. Holland said the same racism and discrimination that led to the initial suburban flight from Jackson in the 1970s are still an obstacle. 

“It seems help is offered, and then the state Legislature stands in the way of help actually arriving,” Holland said. 

Since the flooding in Jackson last fall, both the federal and state government have passed the blame for the condition of the infrastructure back and forth. “Just saying ‘it’s not our fault’ does not bring clean water to anyone,” Holland said.

The state government has incurred vehement backlash due to widespread media coverage of Jackson’s water woes. “The fact that the capital city was not able to provide one of the basics of life to its citizens does not encourage people to think better of Mississippi,” Holland said.

Kieonna Coleman, a resident of Jackson, said that the quality of life in her city has been noticeably lower since the failure of the water treatment pumps last summer. 

“We had a whole big wall full of (bottled) water and used it for 41 days maybe” Coleman said. “We had to use bottled water for everything … to bathe, to cook, you name it.”

As a mother of two, Coleman experienced the effect of water insecurity on education. 

“Kids miss school for at least a month or two, so that’s kind of hard on everybody,” Coleman said.

The water crisis has penetrated almost every function of life, which leads some residents to wonder whether they should leave Jackson altogether. 

“I’ve thought about (moving). Ridgeland, Madison — they don’t have these problems like we have,” Coleman said. “We pay so much money (for services), and I don’t understand why we have to go through the things we go through.” 

Limited access to reliable and safe water has affected Jackson State University, as well, where students coming to Mississippi from all over the country must learn how to live in the fallout of a water crisis. 

Ontario Linson, a freshman at JSU from Virginia Beach, Va., said that he was living in off-campus housing at the time of the 2022 flood. 

“I had to deal with my water being brown, some days yellow,” Linson said. He used bottled water for the next several weeks.

“This is a beautiful city and it’s a beautiful place, but no one wants to do the things that are needed to build upon it,” said Linson.

In September 2022, a class-action lawsuit was filed on the behalf of Jackson residents by a group of attorneys, including Robert Gibbs of Travis and Gibbs, PLLC. 

“We are asking for an injunction because people have been paying for their water bills, but they’re not getting the benefit of that,” Gibbs said. “So we’re asking the court to enjoin the city of Jackson from collecting on water bills where people don’t get the benefit of clean and usable water.”

The defendants named in the lawsuit include the city of Jackson, Mayor Chokwe A. Lumumba; former Jackson Mayor Tony Yarber; former Jackson Public Works directors Kishia Powell, Robert Miller and Jerriot Smash; Siemens Corporation, Siemens Industry, Inc. and Trilogy Engineering Services LLC.

Aside from attempting to prevent unfair billing, Gibbs and co-counsel hope the lawsuit will provide enough money to make necessary repairs to the water system. 

“We want the system to be repaired and fixed so that we don’t constantly have boil water notices, and we won’t have a system that totally goes out,” Gibbs said.

The lawsuit is not the only way in which the community has joined together to alleviate the city’s problems. Directly after the 2022 flood, communities began organizing water drives and deliveries.

“It’s tragic, but there is also the resiliency there,” Luckett said.

Coach Victor Evans, a community outreach coordinator for the city of Jackson, worked closely with Strong Arms of Jackson, a community led youth organization that has strived to provide aid for those most affected by water insecurity.

“The effect and impact in this little community right here has been managed,” Evans said. 

Strong Arms has been given potable and bottled water by the city of Jackson to be distributed in the community. Several other organizations, from church groups to other community-led ventures, have also been distributing water, food and other supplies on-and-off for years. 

“I think the cooperation and the team building and the partnerships have really bound us all together,” Evans said. “It’s not about classification or class, it’s about people.” 

New Horizons Church in south Jackson has been doing much of the same outreach as the Strong Arms. Outreach coordinator Bill Washington said that since the failure of the water system, the church has hosted water drives and sent water to other churches and associations for the homeless. 

“Right now, the citizens don’t trust the water,” Washington said. “As long as people need water, as long as people need to flush or take a shower or wash clothes, the water problem is still going to be here because the water has to float through all of these old pipes.”

Not only has the community of Jackson joined forces, but people from surrounding cities and regions also have contributed to the cause. Lee Coffey, the owner of MSM Water Distribution in Batesville, Miss., said that he has been a part of an effort to take water to the Jackson community for the past two years. During the height of the water insecurity in 2022, Coffey drove truckloads of water to Jackson every week. 

In November 2022, Jackson’s water infrastructure was taken over by the U.S. Department of Justice, which committed $800 million to resolve the water problems in Jackson. Ted Henifin was appointed by a federal judge to be in charge of rehabilitating the water and sewer systems and returning them to self-reliance. 

In a March interview with Mississippi Today, Henifin spoke of his responsibilities. Restoring the infrastructure will take time, which is why Henifin estimated that he will be in Jackson for at least five years. He plans to not only fix the infrastructure of the Jackson water system, but also implement a fair billing system and recommend who should take control of the systems. 

“The reality is that this isn’t something that’s going to be fixed in a couple of years. This is going to require a generational investment,” Luckett said.

A new water billing system has become a point of contention. Currently, the billing system is consumption-based. However, many residents believe they are paying a premium for water that they are not using. According to Mississippi Today, at a town meeting hosted at Forest Hill High School in February, one man said he was billed more than $1,000 in December for water that was brown, and others said they were seeing steep increases in their water bills.

Henifin is proposing an income-fixed water billing system be implemented. This will provide consistent bills for residents that are based solely on what they can afford, as opposed to what they consume. 

“Figuring out how to structure your water rates is complex and something that every community struggles with, but urban areas especially,” Stephanie Otts said. “If you charged the rate that you would need to maintain and operate your system fully, it would price many people out of the water system.” 

Henifin’s income-based billing system proposes making water more affordable while funding necessary maintenance.

“That means that some people in the city will be subsidizing other people in the city,” Otts said. “That’s always considered controversial and I think some of it comes back to what’s our underlying policy. Is the provision of water considered a human right that we all need access to? And in that case we shouldn’t be necessarily paying a premium for our water service.”

One of the primary concerns is what will happen to Jackson’s water systems once Henifin leaves. Although he has the authority to recommend a new chain of command, he has no authority to implement one. Henifin has been vague about what his proposal will be, yet he has alluded to the possibility that a non-profit organization could take ownership of Jackson’s water systems.

Henifin did not respond to a request for an interview.

In February, Senate Bill 2889, which would have created a non-profit organization for this purpose, passed in the Mississippi Senate but died in the House. Jackson residents were concerned that control of the water system would be taken away from the city.

The danger of this, Otts said, lies in its cultural implications. The shifting of power out of the city could create a crisis of confidence towards the city’s overall reliability and towards its officials.

“It’s a little bit of a double-edged sword … unfortunately when they do that, that means the local community, the local government, starts to lose control and authority over their infrastructure decisions. Because it’s now in the hands of a third party whose job is to get the system back in compliance, which we wanted from a larger environmental policy, human health perspective” Otts said.

Ideas for providing long-term oversight for the Jackson water system continue to be debated. However, with no true end to the crisis in sight, residential fatigue continues to be a concern. 

“The attention kind of forced their hands politically and thank God it did. The proof will be in the pudding. … That’s the only thing that will get the confidence of the people who live here is to actually do it, because we’ve been listening to this stuff for a long time and been dealing with it for a long time,” Luckett said.sophia jaramillo