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‘You Can’t Bathe. You Can’t Wash.’ Water Crisis Hobbles Jackson,
Miss., for Weeks
Nearly one month after a winter storm froze pipes and water mains, more
than 70 percent of the city’s water customers remained under a notice to
boil water.
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Lavern Avant in her apartment in Jackson, Miss., with water she has
collected to use and share with friends and family.
Lavern Avant in her apartment in Jackson, Miss., with water she has
collected to use and share with friends and family.Credit...Rory Doyle
for The New York Times
ByEllen Ann FentressandRichard Fausset
<https://www.nytimes.com/by/richard-fausset>
* NYT, March 12, 2021
JACKSON, Miss. — Once again, Lavern Avant was spending her day scouring
Mississippi’s capital city, hoping to get her hands on a basic necessity
that she and many of her neighbors had gone without for weeks.
She made her newly familiar rounds, driving in and out of parking lots,
picking up cases of bottled water for herself, her husband and her
neighbors. This had become her new normal since mid-February, when a
strong winter storm blanketed a wide swath of the state in ice and
nearly collapsed the notoriously rickety municipal water system.
It was wearing her down, she said, and was “more than a mental challenge.”
The city’s water system, parts of which are more than 100 years
old*,*was no match for the storm, the same weather event that crushed
Texas’ power grid and water systems, leaving millions of Texans without
heat or drinkable water. Across Jackson, the freezing temperatures burst
pipes and water mains and left a trail of misery that has stretched on
for nearly a month.
More than 70 percent of the city’s water customers remained this week
under a notice to boil water, including the senior living complex where
Ms. Avant, 62, and her husband have an apartment. On Wednesday, she
drove to five makeshift water distribution centers to stock up.
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The crisis, while this time protracted, is not new in Jackson, a city of
about 160,000 where a majority of residents, including Ms. Avant, are
Black. In Jackson, boil-water notices are common and an enduring
municipal drama has played out for decades, as white flight, an eroding
tax base and poor management have left the remaining residents with old
and broken pipes, but without the public funding to fix them.
ImageMs. Avant using a bottle of drinking water to wash her hands.
Ms. Avant using a bottle of drinking water to wash her hands.
Credit...Rory Doyle for The New York Times
This week, as more running water returned to homes where residents had
relied on bottled water to drink and cook, officials sought both money
to solve the problem and a place to lay the blame.
Parts of Jackson’s water infrastructure are relics of the early part of
the last century. A few years ago, a study found elevated levels of
lead**in the water,prompting comparisons
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/mar/17/high-levels-lead-mississippi-water-flint-michigan>to
the water crisis in Flint, Mich. More recently, Jackson was plagued bya
faulty billing system
<https://www.wlbt.com/2020/12/10/water-billing-problems-persist-frustrating-newcomers-city/>that
failed to charge some customers and accidentally sent others statements
totaling thousands of dollars.
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Mayor Chokwe Lumumba, a Democrat and African-American, has estimated
that modernizing the city’s water infrastructure could cost $2 billion.
Last week, he asked Gov. Tate Reeves, a Republican who is white, for $47
million to help repair the city’s damaged water system.
Image
Jackson residents waited for drinking water and food boxes at a
distribution point on Thursday.
Jackson residents waited for drinking water and food boxes at a
distribution point on Thursday. Credit...Rory Doyle for The New York Times
Mr. Reeves called in the National Guard last month to help distribute
water and has hinted that the state might take over Jackson’s water
system. His chief of staff, Brad White, said the governor’s office was
helping the city explore securing low-interest state loans to help pay
for upgrades. He also noted that Mr. Lumumba had been meeting with
members of the Republican-dominated State Legislature, including Lt.
Gov. Delbert Hosemann, who presides over the Senate, in an effort to
secure more state funding.
In an interview this week, Mr. Lumumba said he hoped the current crisis
would finally push both state and city officials in the direction of a
long-term solution.
“There’s a saying that you should allow no crisis to go to waste,” he
said. “It’s crises like these that really allow us to take stock of
conditions of where we are as a city, where we are as a state and
hopefully it allows us to build the resolve to address it.”
The city has had a dwindling tax base for decades, after the integration
of schools and other public spaces in Jackson triggered a dramatic
flight of white residents. In many cases, they took their wealth and tax
dollars with them. In 1960, the city was about 64 percent white and 36
percent Black. Today it is about 16 percent white and 82 percent Black.
This week, the water barely trickled from the faucets in Carolyn
Willis’s apartment. Ms. Willis, a retired nursing home cook who is
Black, said that in a majority-white city, the kind of water crisis she
and her neighbors continued to face “wouldn’t be happening.”
“I don’t think our water would be like it is,” Ms. Willis, 69, said. “I
don’t feel like we would have to pick up the phone and call these people
about the water.”
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Image
Volunteers handed out water and food boxes.
Volunteers handed out water and food boxes. Credit...Rory Doyle for The
New York Times
Jackson’s crisis shares some similarities with Detroit, where
deindustrialization and white flight emptied out the city, leaving a
smaller population to support vast infrastructure systems.
“Jackson’s infrastructure was built at a time when the population was
much higher, and white flight has led to divestment,” Mr. Lumumba said.
“It has left fewer people to maintain what was built for more people.”
Its troubles also mirror those of another capital city, Washington,
D.C., where large numbers of government properties pay no property tax.
Mr. Lumumba said the city “provides water for the state of Mississippi,
but we don’t get paid for the water we provide to them. If we simply
charged the state like any other customer, we’d be in a lot better
position.”
Residents like Ms. Willis are ready for the inconvenience to end. “You
can’t bathe,” she said. “You can’t wash.”
So are businesses. Scott Evans, an owner of a dog-grooming service on
the south side of Jackson, has been using a pickup to haul trash cans
full of water from his home 18 miles away in Florence, Miss.
The business, Grooming Unlimited, typically handles 70 dogs a week. But
these days, the limit has been about two or three dogs a day. Mr. Evans
and his sister, Mary Ann Bowman, heat the water on a butane burner on
the back porch and then bathe dogs with jugs of warmed water.
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“It’s already killing my back, lifting jugs,” Ms. Bowman said. “You’ve
got to rinse them. You’ve got to wash them.”
The business owners are frustrated but philosophical. “We’re going to
have to deal with it. I’m 63 years old. I’m too old to move somewhere
else and pay for it again,” Ms. Bowman said. “We’re just going to have
to tough it out.”
Ms. Bowman said there was plenty of blame to go around. “You can’t blame
one mayor. This has been going on for 50 years,” she said.
This week, Ms. Avant finished her scavenger hunt with a trunk full of
bottled water that she brought back to her seniors’ complex. She gave
two cases to a neighbor and three to a cousin who broke one of his legs
in the February ice storm.
Ms. Avant and her husband, both Mississippi natives, retired from their
property remodeling business in Atlanta a couple of years ago and
returned to Jackson to be closer to family. She spoke warmly of the
camaraderie that the recent water crisis had engendered as neighbors
worked together to scour the city and keep the bottles coming.
But she also said she had had enough. Soon, she said, she and her
husband would move back to Atlanta.
Image
Ms. Avant organizing bottles of non-potable water she saves for flushing
the toilet.
Ms. Avant organizing bottles of non-potable water she saves for flushing
the toilet.Credit...Rory Doyle for The New York Times
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