Old pipes in Mississippi's capital city keep breaking, leading to potentially unsafe water
JACKSON, Miss. — Water outages are so common in Jackson, Mississippi, some residents hardly notice them.
Betsy Cubit, 73, didn’t know her street had lost water for a few hours one day in September until a neighbor knocked on her door.
For four days after the water returned, Cubit and her Gardner Street neighbors were told to boil their water because it had been deemed potentially unsafe to drink.
The boil water advisory in Cubit’s neighborhood was one of several throughout the Jackson metro area in recent weeks. From Aug. 24 to Sept. 23, more than 6,600 Jackson water and sewer customers — one of every 10 — were subject to the advisories because of system failures, according to a review of public records.
The constant stream of boil advisories has upended the lives of many Jacksonians to the point of acceptance. And there is no end in sight. Fixing Jackson's faulty water system would take more than $1 billion and more than a decade to complete city officials said.
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"We've just gotten used to it," said Rosaline McCoy, president of the Jackson Council Parent Teachers Association. "We make adjustments and we keep going."
Majority of system needs replacing
Jackson’s water and sewer systems have been subject to neglect and disrepair for decades, with regular notices to boil water, spurred by water main breaks dating at least to the 1960s, according to Clarion Ledger, a part of the Paste BN Network, archives.
“There’s always been frequencies in relation to boil water notices,” said Charles Williams, Jackson’s chief engineer.
Every time there is an outage or a the system loses water pressure, the city of Jackson is supposed to issue a boil water order for the impacted areas.
The majority of the city’s distribution pipes are old and made of cast iron, Williams said. When the soil shifts in times of dry weather or extreme cold, the pipes burst, leading to service outages.
“I would say the majority of the system needs to be replaced,” Williams said.
Frequent boil advisories are the result of a neglected, cash-strapped water system, said Megan Mullin, an associate professor of environmental politics at Duke University.
"In order to mitigate that, you need ongoing maintenance, which means financial investment in pipe replacement, in treatment facility upgrades," Mullin said.
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Jackson’s yearly water and sewer budget is typically not much more than $60 million, according to city budget records. Over the last three years, Jackson budgeted between $3 million and $3.3 million annually on water distribution system maintenance.
“We’ve always had plans (for fixing Jackson’s water),” Williams said. “The problem has been the implementation portion of it that directly correlates to funding.”
Water in Jackson under scrutiny for years
Water main breaks and boil orders aren't Jackson's only water problems.
The city’s drinking water hasn’t met the minimum quality requirements for four of the past five and a half years, according to records from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
In June 2015, Jackson's drinking water was found to have dangerously high levels of lead — almost 50% higher than the acceptable limit, according to annual water reports. To date, Jackson residents remain under an advisory warning from the EPA that pregnant and nursing mothers and children should not consume the city’s tap water.
Amal Mitra, professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at Jackson State University, said boiling water can kill some viruses and bacteria, but it doesn’t remove heavy metals like lead.
“Any amount of lead, for example, is harmful to the growth and cognitive function of our children,” he said. “Children with lead poisoning may show symptoms of poor appetite, poor school performance, abnormal behaviors, sleeping disturbances and growth retardation.”
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The boil water orders from recent weeks are the latest infrastructure issues for Jackson’s water utility in a particularly difficult 2021.
The February winter storm left many in the capital city without water for a month. In late April, some in the city were subject to boil water advisories after a fire broke out at the O.B. Curtis Water Treatment Facility.
Should Jackson experience another severe winter storm, there’s no guarantee the water system will hold up, Williams said.
“We’ve made some progress as it relates to plant upgrades and that continues to move forward,” Williams said. “We have not made substantial improvements in the distribution system. Typically, we’ve had more (weather-related) issues with the distribution system than the plants.”
Residents find Jackson water hard to trust, make adjustments
Two weeks after the outage, a deep, muddy, water-filled hole remains in the road on Gardner Street, in north Jackson.
A few hundred yards away, standing on his front porch, Patrick Shell said he didn't think much of it when the water went out for a few hours on Sept. 19.
Cubit and Shell, like other people in the neighborhood and across the city, have concerns about the safety of Jackson’s tap water. Cubit said she doesn’t mind drinking it because of her age. But if she were younger?
“If I were … a young mother with children or pregnant or something like that, I would be concerned about it all,” Cubit said.
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The outage in their neighborhood also impacted nearby schools, and three Jackson elementary schools were advised to boil water in recent weeks.
Shell said he didn't know his neighborhood was under a boil advisory. Luckily, it didn't matter. He and his family — Shell and his wife have two young children — use bottled water for everything they can, he said. Even Shell's dog drinks bottled water.
"You can't continually have that many water main breaks and not have a problem with the sanitation," Shell said. "If I had a way to infuse our (bottled) water supply into the dishwasher, I would."
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