Mississippi is in a state of emergency due to an ongoing water crisis.
City officials say severe flooding over the weekend,
damaged a water treatment plant and
now up to 180,000 residents have no safe drinking water and no running water.
>> That's right, Mississippi, one of the red states that has decided to strip
women of their reproductive rights because they purport to wanna save lives.
Doesn't seem to care very much about ensuring that they have a well functioning
water infrastructure so people have access to clean, safe drinking water.
Which I think you might need to survive, right, to live.
>> Some people.
>> Yeah, some, not everyone, not everyone.
Anyway, there are some more details to this.
Tate Reeves has declared a state of emergency and here are some of his
comments about that state of emergency in a recent press conference.
>> The city cannot produce enough water to fight fires to
reliably flush toilets and to meet other critical needs.
Please stay safe.
Do not drink the water.
In too many cases,
it is raw water from the reservoir being pushed through the pipes.
Replacing our largest cities infrastructure of running water
with human distribution is a massively complicated logistical task.
We need to provide it for up to 180,000 people for
an unknown period of time.
>> Tate Reeves Governor of Mississippi, very charismatic speaker.
I can understand why the people of Mississippi would elect
that man into office.
Now, the reasons for Jackson's water crisis are in fact complicated and
they include a combination of factors.
But at the heart of it, and make no mistake about this,
they underfunded the water infrastructure.
It's been around for over 100 years with no improvements.
And this is what you can expect when you nickel and
dime the people of your state and you focus all of your energies on
stripping women of their reproductive rights instead.
Now damaged this summer, two pumps at the main water treatment facility made failure
increasingly likely as the summer progressed, the governor said.
And flooding of the Pearl River after heavy rains last week affected treatment
processes and therefore the amount of running water the system can provide.
Now homes and businesses have been left with little to no water pressure.
Jackson schools switched to virtual learning as a result of all of this.
And hospitals remember hospitals right about hospitals and schools.
They've had to bring in Porta potties to deal with this situation
cause they can't flush the toilet.
The city was already even before this emergency under a boil water notice
that was actually implemented in late July because of the water quality issue.
Again, even before this latest emergency.
And now Jackson has run out of bottled water.
It's just the gift that keeps on giving.
So residents of all ages were seen waiting in lines more than
a mile long at Hawkins Field Airport for
at least two hours Tuesday for just one case of bottled water.
The event was supposed to span three hours but barely ran two as people
were eventually turned away when the 700 cases of water ran out.
Can we just address that as well though?
So each person who showed up would get one case of water.
They just had 700 cases of water, so 700 people got some help.
You guys are really nailing it.
>> This cant be good.
>> Yeah. >> Yeah, yeah, look,
infrastructure like this can fail in any place does fail in lots of places.
The question that we need to ask beyond just how can this be fixed as soon
as possible for
the people who are suffering is what could have been done to prep for this.
What was known that could have informed, what could have been done to prep for
this and what will actually be done coming out of it?
This is the sort of thing that coming out of this you would want to fix to make sure
that it doesn't happen again.
But we know in red areas,
often they don't care how many times the power grid of Texas is gonna fail.
It's one thing to say,
it's a crisis that could happen anywhere even though in that case.
It could kind of only happen in Texas because they decided to segment off their
their power grid, but how you gonna respond to it?
Are you going to invest the money necessary to upgrade your water
infrastructure?
You're gonna choose to do that, maybe Tate Reeves will take it really seriously.
But I would say that this is kind of how government is supposed to function.
It is designed to to maintain enough stability that the economic system can
be maintained through a combination of deregulation.
Politicians are bought off by the corporations as well as a healthy dose of
oppression for the lower classes.
Beyond that, it doesn't really matter what happens, if the water goes out that
might eventually affect the rich, but they're gonna be fine for
a lot longer than you are, you can be guaranteed of that.
And the issue is that every one of these natural disasters is its own unique horror
in the present.
And a prelude to even worse things coming literally every time,
I guess there's a rain season in Mississippi or
a fire season in California, it gets cold in Texas.
And these are things that are not rare, they happen every year.
They're just getting worse every year because the climate
is getting more chaotic every year.
>> There's also a racial component to this that I think is important, right?
Because the underfunding of the water infrastructure is on purpose.
It's not like they don't know they're doing that.
>> We've never seen that happen in any other part of the country.
>> And it's no surprise that this is happening in Jackson where the majority
of the population is actually African American.
Jackson, the state capital is more than 80% black or
African American according to census data.
One in four Jackson residents also live in poverty.
So we're talking about people of color.
We're talking about people who don't have the money to fight back against
the treatment that they're dealing with by their state government.
For years, residents of the majority black city have endured everything from
service disruptions and recurring boil water advisories.
To concerns over contaminants like lead and E.coli bacteria
thanks to failures to upgrade Jackson's aging infrastructure.
So in this case we're talking about the local government or
the state government that's supposed to provide the money
necessary to make improvements to the infrastructure.
And then you have the privatized utility model which is a disaster in places like
Texas as John perfectly mentioned.
And also in California where PG & E has started many disastrous,
devastating wildfires with their terrible out of date equipment
that they refused to spend money on to improve and update.
And so this is what we're dealing with in the country.
And by the way, in California Gavin Newsom, he bailed out PG&E,
in Texas after hundreds of people died from a winter storm where
their energy grid failed because they didn't weatherize.
It didn't wanna spend the money to weatherize it.
What did Abbott do?
Did Abbott change anything?
No, they still have a privatized energy grid that's
disconnected from the rest of the power grid in this country.
>> He changed some things, he started focusing a lot more on trans athletes in
high school, he did start talking more about that.
So that was a change.
I don't wanna be unfair to the guy.
>> Exactly, let's give credit where credit is due.
No and the issue is that in a lot of these areas you would think that there would be
a strong call from regular people to elect politicians that
will finally fix these historic problems.
But a lot of these places are heavily gerrymandered, voters suppressed,
that's even before the most recent round.
And it makes it difficult for people to get the government that they deserve.
>> And honestly, all of those obstacles are definitely true and
they're in the way.
But think about how these people are just trying to survive, okay?
There are obstacles in the way by their own elected officials.
Like obstacles in surviving, not even just changing the system or
getting other elected officials elected into office.
It's insane.