Water crisis still hitting residents in Mississippi
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The largest city in the US state of Mississippi is still struggling with water problems more than two weeks after winter storms and freezing weather ravaged the system in Jackson, knocking out water for drinking and making it impossible for many to even flush their toilets.
About 160,000 residents are still being warned to boil any water that does come out of the taps.
“I pray it comes back on,” local resident Nita Smith said. “I’m not sure how much more of this we can take.”
She has had no water at home for nearly three weeks.
She is concerned about her mother who has diabetes. Her mother and most of the other older people on her street don’t drive, so Smith has been helping them get water to clean themselves and flush their toilets.
A key focus of city crews is filling the system’s water tanks to an optimal level.
But, public works director Charles Williams said on Wednesday that fish, tree limbs and other debris have clogged screens where water moves from a reservoir into a treatment plant. That caused pressure to drop for the entire water system.
“Today was not a good day for us,” the director said.
He said about a quarter of Jackson’s customers remained without running water. That is more than 10,000 connections, with most serving multiple people.
City officials on Wednesday continued distributing water for flushing toilets at several pick-up points. But they’re giving no specific timeline for resolving problems. Workers continue to fix dozens of water main breaks and leaks.
Jackson’s water system has not been able to provide a sustainable flow of water throughout the city since the mid-February storms, city officials say.
The system “basically crashed like a computer and now we’re trying to rebuild it,” Williams said at a recent briefing.
The city’s water mains are more than a century old, and its infrastructure needs went unaddressed for decades, Democratic Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba said. “We more than likely have more than a US$2 billion issue with our infrastructure.”
Mississippi’s capital is not alone in water problems.
Two weeks have passed the cold wave shut down the main power grid in the state of Texas, leaving millions in freezing homes, causing about 50 deaths and disabling thousands of public water systems serving those millions.
Four public water systems in the state remained out of commission on Wednesday, affecting 456 customers, and 225 systems still have 135,299 customers boiling their tap water, according to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.
Also, 208 of the state’s 254 counties are still reporting public water system issues.
Bonnie Bishop, 68, and her husband, Mike, 63, have been without water at their Jackson home for 14 days. Both have health problems.
She’s recovering from coronavirus but still in therapy to learn how to walk again and deals with neuropathy in her hands and feet.
The water shortage made her fail to soak her feet in warm water, something that usually provides relief, or help her husband gather water to boil for cooking for cleaning.
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