In the summer of 2015, officials in Jackson, Mississippi, sent the state a series of water samples taken at various locations throughout the city’s public water system. Residents had complained for weeks about the low pressure in their faucets, and the city wanted to test the distribution system to check for possible contamination. Sure enough, regulators in the Mississippi State Department of Health, or MSDH, identified elevated lead levels in the water supply. But rather than immediately inform the city of the public health risk, they sat on the data for half a year. Unwittingly, residents continued to drink poisoned water.
Officials in the Environmental Protection Agency were unaware of the problem until they inspected the city’s water system in February and March 2020. While in Jackson, they found a network of pipes plagued by leaks, poor corrosion control and elevated lead levels. These “persistent and alarming violations” prompted the EPA to issue an emergency order requiring the city to make improvements. As the events of the following years would show, it was already too late: The following winter, Jackson experienced a system-wide failure during a storm, leaving several areas of the city without water for weeks. Then, in August 2022, the city’s main water treatment plant failed due to heavy flooding, causing a high-profile public health crisis that captured the nation’s attention. To this day, some residents feel they cannot dependent on the system to deliver safe drinking water.
For years, none of the stakeholders with some authority over Jackson’s water system took full responsibility for the water crisis. The state government long blamed city officials for mismanaging the system and violating the Safe Drinking Water Act. City officials blamed the state for that reject their repeated requests for funds to improve the failing infrastructure. The EPA also had a role to play. In May a report from the Project for State Oversight found that for years EPA regulators turned a blind eye to Mississippi’s routing of federal dollars away from Jackson. Now, a new report from the EPA’s Office of Inspector General, an independent office within the agency, puts the Mississippi Department of Health in the hot seat.
The MSDH’s failure to promptly report the results of Jackson’s lead tests in 2015 is just one example of the communication failures that have kept local and federal officials in the dark about the dire conditions of the city’s water system. found the report. Beyond that single incident, the Inspector General reported that MSDH officials repeatedly failed to document financial and technical capacity challenges; address systemic deficiencies such as excessive distribution line breaks and boil water notices; or notify the city of any of the issues they have identified. These practices “obscured the longstanding challenges of the system, allowed problems to worsen over time, and contributed to the system’s failure,” the report said.
Dominic DeLeo, a local clean water advocate and longtime Jackson resident, told Grist that it’s not fair to blame city officials for problems they don’t fully understand. Over the past half century, Jackson has suffered a long period of decline, the result of deindustrialization and white flight that has stripped local government of resources to maintain the city’s aging infrastructure. Last year the Mississippi newspaper the Clarion Ledger reported that Jackson is the fastest shrinking city in the country. City officials apparently had information about how Jackson’s water system failed. For years before the water crisis, the city’s Department of Public Works raised the alarm about persistent budget shortfalls and staffing shortages that made it impossible to address problems with the water system.
In 2016, Jackson’s City Council refused to declare a civil emergency to deal with persistent water issues so as not to raise public alarm. “What we don’t want is for people in the city concerned or any of our customers to worry that there is something wrong with the water supply,” said then-mayor Tony Yarber. Then, at a 2021 hearing, the director of the city’s Department of Public Works, Bob Miller, said, “There’s no other way to say it, but we’re holding on to our fingers.” The missing piece for Jackson along the way was the lack of money available to do anything with the information they did have.
Despite the dire conditions in Jackson, the state has failed to send funds from the federal Drinking Water State Revolving Fund to the city to diagnose and address its water issues. Had the EPA been notified of the issues in Jackson earlier, the agency could have taken proactive steps, such as providing more oversight to MSDH or making sure federal emergency funds got to Jackson more quickly, to prevent the kind of system-wide failures that Jackson made a noise. in subsequent years. One of the problems that state regulators omitted in their annual reports was the persistent boil water notices Jackson residents faced in the years leading up to the crisis. The city will post these notices when pressure has dropped in residents’ faucets, the result of leaks throughout the water system. On average, distribution networks should experience no more than 15 outages per 100 miles of line each year, according to the OIG. In Jackson, the system experienced an average of 55 line breaks per 100 miles between 2017 and 2021.
The report’s findings offer validation to Jackson residents who have long felt abandoned by the state.
“I wish it [the report] did surprise us, but the trust level of the community with the state is so low,” said Makani Themba, a local activist. “The governor tends to attack us when he has a shot. It was just hostile.”
After the EPA charged Jackson officials with violating the Safe Drinking Water Act in January 2022, a federal judge revoked the city’s authority to manage its own water system. Ted Henifin, an engineer by training, was appointed to oversee the system until conditions improved in Jackson. Last year, the Biden administration secured an unprecedented $600 million in emergency funds for Jackson to rebuild its treatment plants and distribution network. While some local residents have reported noticeable improvements in their water pressure over the past year, others continue to report discolored, smelly tap water. But the biggest problem with Henifin’s tenure, city attorneys told Grist, is the opacity of his spending.
Henifin has full authority to decide how to allocate the infusion of federal dollars awarded to Jackson last year. Shortly after starting his new role, the engineer created a company called JXN Water to facilitate his overhaul of the system, cause concern on privatization. According to Themba and DeLeo, many residents have seen their utility bills rise since the engineer took over the system. Despite repeated requests for information about how the $600 million is being spent, the only information local advocates can reliably get about the water system is from the quarterly reports Henifin provides to the federal judge who appointed him. This lack of transparency prompted a coalition of local advocacy groups to urge the EPA to drop its lawsuit against the city of Jackson. That request has been granted earlier this year. And still, Themba told Grist, they have yet to look at Henifin’s budget.
The OIG’s report contains a variety of recommendations for the EPA to provide better oversight of the MSDH, including a complete assessment of the state’s process for monitoring municipal water systems and enforcing federal drinking water standards. EPA officials should also train Mississippi regulators on how to better document system deficiencies and enter that information into a federal database, the report said. According to the OIG, the EPA agreed with all seven of its recommendations. The MSDH did not release an official statement on the report, but said the Mississippi Free Press and ProPublica last week that it was revising the document.
DeLeo told Grist that the main reason things are improving in some parts of Jackson has not been renewed state or federal oversight or the management of Ted Henifin, but the availability of funding that the low-income city desperately needs. Until Biden issued the emergency funding, Jackson had to use the state as a conduit for receiving federal grant money — a dynamic that rarely worked out in the city’s favor.
“Had Jackson officials addressed all the problems the EPA said they needed to address” before the water crisis, DeLeo asked. “Yes. Did they have the means or the resources to do so? No. At some point the question becomes, whose fault is it?”
