Living in a city with no water: 'This is unbearable'
JACKSON, Miss. — What stood out this week was the calm. The streets were quiet, and residents queued expectantly for resources.
The entire city of more than 150,000 was without safe drinking water, with no end in sight. Many residents here say they adapted long ago to catastrophic government failure.
“Jackson’s water’s been messed up; I don’t even feel like they should be issuing people bills,” said Roshonda Snell, 32, who works at a local hotel. “It’s infected, and you can’t even do nothing with it.”
Snell is a beneficiary of the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and says she has been using most of the money she receives from it to buy water for her family for a while. “I spend about $200 on bottled water every month. That’s mainly what I use that money for, to buy five big cases of water for the month,” said Snell, a Jackson native. “I really want to leave Jackson so bad.”
The water system in Jackson, the Mississippi capital, has been failing for years. In 2021, a harsh winter storm knocked the system out for a month. Even when water is flowing from the taps, residents struggle with intermittent boil-water advisories and high bills for water that is not always safe to drink. This week, in part because of severe floods, the treatment plant failed completely, leaving the city’s residents without water to drink, bathe or even flush toilets.
Gov. Tate Reeves (R) declared Jackson’s ongoing water crisis an “immediate health threat.” Experts say this crisis was years in the making, a result of inadequate funding for essential infrastructure upgrades. For the past year, leaders of this majority-Black, Democrat-led city have pushed for additional funding from the White Republicans who run the state. Little has come of those appeals.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/09/03/jackson-mississippi-water-crisis/?utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter
