One year after the water system in Jackson, Mississippi, failed during heavy flooding — precipitating one of the highest-profile municipal public health crises in recent U.S. history — officials are telling residents that their water is safe to drink. But these claims have failed to restore Jacksonians’ trust in the system: Last week, two local advocacy organizations filed an emergency petition with the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, requesting interim relief from persistently poor water quality and a greater degree of public involvement in plans to update the infrastructure.
The petition follows a press conference in mid-June, during which Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba announced a new initiative to distribute water filters to customers of the city’s beleaguered water system.
The federal government had been generous in providing critical funding to repair the system, he said, “but none of this will make any difference if we don’t restore the confidence within our residents,” many of whom were still buying bottled water. Providing filters, particularly to vulnerable people like pregnant women and families with young children, might help convince residents to use their taps again, he reasoned.
The speech landed him in federal court a week later, where a judge expressed concern that his comments contradicted the progress that had been made since the court had appointed a third-party manager, Ted Henifin, to oversee the city’s water system after its treatment plants failed last August.
“There is no health risk drinking the water that I’m aware of,” Henifin told the court on June 21. “We really need to be careful with messaging about the water.”
These assurances seem to contradict the experiences of many Jackson residents. In court testimony and interviews with Grist, residents described chronic odors and discoloration in their tap water, which has persisted even after the water manager’s remarks in June. In the petition filed last week, local groups also claimed that officials have failed to adequately account for numerous sources of lead and bacteria that could be contaminating the city’s water supply.
“Due to inadequate corrosion control, the downplay of historical lead contamination risk, failure to identify the locations of lead service lines, and the continued delay in rehabilitating microbial treatment processes, Jacksonians have no confidence in [Henifin’s] sweeping statements that Jackson’s tap water is safe for all,” the petition read. (The EPA has not yet responded publicly to the petition; when approached to comment for this story, Lumumba’s office referred Grist to Henifin, who did not respond to requests for comment.)
Jackson made national headlines last August after torrential rain caused the pumps at its main water treatment facility to fail, forcing local officials to distribute bottled water to the city’s 180,000 people. But the problem long predates that high-profile event. Jackson’s residents have endured years of low-pressure taps and rolling notices recommending that they boil their water before use. In March 2020, the EPA issued an emergency order warning that the water system could contain elevated levels of bacteria such as E. coli. Four years before that, state officials identified elevated lead levels in the drinking water.
Source : grist