'Failed your people': Longtime Jackson residents hope water crisis will finally wake city up
JACKSON, Miss. – In 1960, Bertha Anderson toted water from a well in rural Yazoo County.
In 2021, she filled buckets from a ditch in Jackson.
At least in 1960, she says, she could drink the water.
Anderson, 84, lives in a tightknit, sleepy neighborhood on Dewitt Avenue, which has, like most of Jackson, lacked reliable access to water for years, long before today's water crisis.
"It ain't nothing new," Anderson said.
Almost all of her neighbors are Black, and roughly three quarters are senior citizens. Many have felt frustrated, exhausted and overlooked by city and state leaders as they struggled with inconsistent or no water pressure since the latest crisis began. Residents hope the emergency will be the start of a change.
“You done failed your people,” said Dewitt Avenue's Larry Kelly, 64, referring to the city's leaders. “You say you love Mississippi, you love your state. But I don’t believe that.”
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Empty faucets, empty words
The cracked and tan-brown street has several scars of fresher asphalt covering water pipes that city crews repaired weeks after they burst. The newest patch, in front of Arlishea Dyson’s house, covers the site of a leak that diverted water from at least eight Dewitt Avenue homes for almost a month.
Anderson remembers first spotting the leak in the street in February 2021. She stepped outside one morning and noticed water bubbling in front of Dyson’s house. She said she called the city of Jackson that day, and an employee told her what many Dewitt Avenue residents have realized are empty words: “We’ll send someone down there.”
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From her front porch, Anderson watched the stream of water shoot higher; no one came to repair it. After three days, the pipe's hole was large enough to leave the homes of Anderson, Dyson and others downstream of the burst, without water.
Anderson and her family filled a bucket with enough water from the runoff flooding the street to flush the toilet and carried it home, just as she did half a century before.
Dyson, 43, did the same. So did Ruth Cottrell, 73. Drinking and cooking with the water was out of the question. Some haven’t consumed it in years. Anderson, who hasn’t drunk it in 20 years, said it tastes “like a cesspool.”
During the 2021 crisis, Anderson's family bathed using water jugs or walked down the street to a relative’s house to shower. Others cleaned themselves using boiled and cooled runoff water. As Dyson’s son boiled street water to bathe, he accidentally spilled it on himself and suffered second-degree burns, Dyson said.
They were without water for about three weeks, Anderson and Dyson said, during which time Anderson called the city at least twice. Dyson also called. When someone finally came to fix the break, Anderson remembered what they said: “Damn this water.”
Kelly said a pipe burst at the other end of the street four years ago. He said his water pressure was mostly unaffected, but the water was discolored. Kelly believed groundwater had seeped into his water line. It gave his son stomach cramps.
A frustrated Kelly worried for his son and his wife, who has diabetes. They stopped drinking the water, and he asked for someone with the city to repair the pipe. He said workers came and looked at it several times without repairing it.
“Who are you going to send to fix it?” Kelly asked. When city crews do come to fix water problems in the area, several residents complained about lack of notice before their water is shut off for hours.
Forgotten
Ray Charles McClinton moved to Dewitt Avenue in 1973 when he was 13. He remembers how different it once was.
“Everything was lovely. People would go over here,” he said, pointing in front of his house. “Children were running up and down the streets.”
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The overgrown lots across from his house used to hold nice homes. It seemed the city cared about them back then, McClinton said. Police would patrol on foot. City workers would help clear tree limbs. If people had a complaint, they felt as if someone would show up, he recalled.
The area began declining around 2000, McClinton said. A few years later is when Kelly, 25, remembers water system failures first affecting him.
It feels as if the only people who come to help now are in ambulances, Kelly said. He wonders whether the city would be more responsive to his calls if he lived in a richer area.
“They’d’ve been on out there” if it was a wealthier neighborhood, Kelly said. The average income in the area is about $15,000, according to census data. “There’s no joke about it," he said.
Kelly, Dyson, McClinton, Anderson and Cottrell were all stung with monthly water bills of as much as $5,000 several years ago – an issue affecting thousands of Jackson residents that has yet to be resolved. Some paid them off over years out of fear of having their water turned off. Others ignored them. Some just aren’t receiving their water bills. Anderson hasn’t gotten one in at least two years.
With the dirty water, poor water pressure and late garbage pickup, he feels like the last of Jackson's priorities.
“The way they're doing you, like they damn forgot about you – ‘Oh, we don't worry about them,’” Kelly said. “You're last on the list.”
Most folks on Dewitt Avenue rattle off several causes of their struggles, all leading back to one common theme: what they say is the city’s incompetence and inability to agree on the right course of action.
“To me, it’s sad that the mayor and the City Council can’t come to agreements on anything,” Dyson said.
City and state officials have sparred publicly over the response to the crisis and money to repair the water system. Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba acknowledged Tuesday that it's a longstanding problem and that immediate fixes wouldn't be enough in the long term.
“The people of Jackson don't care about our differences,” Lumumba said. “It is important that we demonstrate love and do something that quite honestly so many administrations have failed to do over the time, whether you're talking about the city or the state, and that is to fix a problem that has been plaguing our residents for decades.”
The city did not respond to requests for comment from the Clarion Ledger, part of the Paste BN Network.
Getting by, moving forward
Kelly can tell you how much a case of 24 bottles of water cost at the Food Lion. It’s the cheapest he has found: two cases for $7. At Sam’s Club, you can get a gallon for $1.28, he said. McClinton keeps a wall-high stack of cases of water bottles at home. .
The most recent crisis yellowed several residents’ water for a few days, and they all suffered unpredictable water pressure – sometimes not enough to flush a toilet.
But they are getting by. Anderson said a man who lived nearby walked down the street and handed out water bottles “just to be kind.”
Still, they say they need change. People are frustrated to “pay for water they can’t drink,” Anderson said.
“I’m kind of glad that the governor stepped in,” Dyson said. Anderson nodded her head in agreement. “Because if not, there’s no telling. It might have been worse than what it is.”