As a blast of bitter Arctic air poured into North America around Christmas Time in December 2022,
weather conditions impacted nearly every aspect of life, from travel to electricity to just
trying to get out the front door. But the frigid temperatures kicked one American city while it
was already down. For many people, the idea of not being able to drink the water in their own
house is unimaginable. But for the residents of Jackson, Mississippi, it was just another day…or
twelve. Last August, a flood took out the aging water system, leaving nearly everyone in the City
without water for more than a week. Only a few months later, that arctic weather spell broke
so many pipes in the city that residents again lost access to water, some for nearly two weeks,
continuing one of the worst water crises in American history. It’s a stark reminder of the
massive undertaking involved in providing clean water, day after day, to an entire city of people
at once and the enormous stakes of getting it wrong. What does it really take to run a public
water supply, what happened in Jackson, and what does its future hold? I’m Grady, and this
is Practical Engineering. In today’s episodes, we’re talking about the Jackson water crisis.
Jackson is not only the capital of Mississippi but also its largest city. Its water utility
has around 70,000 connections to homes and businesses and services about 170,000 people
through two surface water treatment plants. The OB Curtis plant is the larger of the two, with
a rated capacity of 50 million gallons per day or 190,000 cubic meters per day. An intake structure
collects raw water from a nearby reservoir. That’s the term for untreated surface water. From there,
two large-diameter pipelines carry the water to the headworks of the plant. At the headworks,
pumps send the raw water through various treatment processes to clean it up and, ideally,
make it safe for drinking. Closer to downtown, the JH Fewell Plant has a rated capacity of about
half the OB Curtis plant. It draws raw water directly from the Pearl River downstream of the
reservoir. The City also has a few groundwater wells to supplement the surface water system.
In normal conditions, clean and drinkable water flows from both plants into a network of pipes
and elevated tanks that deliver that water to each building in the City of Jackson. This is a public
water supply, something that might sound kind of obvious, but that term has a specific meaning.
Because not just anyone can hook a bunch of pipes up to customers and sell them water. Water is both
an immediate necessity for life on this blue earth and a powerful agent of disease transmission,
so we have rules that regulate those who would collect it and deliver it to others. Specifically,
we have the Safe Drinking Water Act, and each state also has its own rules that
govern contaminants, monitoring, and public notifications. The goal of drinking water
regulation is to make sure that no matter where you are in the United States, you can open the tap
and use that water to cook, bathe, or drink, and not have to worry about getting sick. This might
sound like a relatively ordinary endeavor, but designing, building, operating, and maintaining a
public water system - even for a relatively small city like Jackson - is a monumental enterprise
that requires a lot of money, a lot of people, a lot of oversight, and a lot of infrastructure.
Unfortunately, Jackson has gone without many of those necessities for decades, creating issues
in the City that eventually led the federal government, specifically the Environmental
Protection Agency or EPA, to conduct an inspection of the system in 2020. What they saw shocked them.
The City’s water system was in such a state of disrepair and mismanagement
that the EPA immediately issued an emergency order. Regulation of a public water system
usually falls to the state, in this case the Mississippi State Department of Health,
but the federal government can step in if there is an imminent and substantial threat to public
health, and in this case, the EPA decided there was. The emergency order required the City to
create a plan to fix all the broken equipment and bring the system back into working order,
but the urgency was too little, and too late. From that time in
early 2020 until nearly the present day, Jackson’s water system faced a seemingly
unending cascade of challenges bringing to light just how bad things had gotten.
In February of 2021, the same winter storm that nearly took out the Texas power grid,
hit the City of Jackson too. The unseasonably cold weather affected water mains below the
city streets, causing them to break and leak. So many water mains broke that the pumps at
the water treatment plants couldn’t keep up. The result was the pressure in the system dropping,
in some places so low that they had no water pressure at all. In other words, they had no
water. Like it had done so many times before, the City issued a system-wide boil water notice. You
may have heard this term before but not quite understood the implications. Water systems are
pressurized well beyond what’s needed to move the water through the pipes. That’s done for a reason.
High pressure keeps unwanted contaminants out. If the system loses pressure, pollutants can be
drawn into the pipes through cracks, breaks, or joints, contaminating the water inside. So if a
main breaks or a pump stops working or a treatment plant has to shut down, the operator sends out a
boil water notice to affected customers, letting them know that their water might be contaminated,
and that it should be boiled to kill any potential pathogens before using it for drinking or cooking.
This notice in February 2021 lasted for an entire month. Imagine not being able to trust the water
from your tap for that long. But even though that particular notice was eventually lifted, residents
of Jackson have lived under a practically constant recommendation to boil the water
that comes out of the tap, and that’s if they even have any water to boil in the first place.
Only a few months later, in April of 2021, an electrical fire in the OB Curtis plant took
out all five of the high-service pumps, the ones that deliver fresh water into the distribution
system. Again the pipes lost pressure, and again a boil water notice was issued, this one lasting
for four days. It would be another year before the electrical panel for the pumps would be replaced,
crippling the treatment plant’s ability to pressurize the water system. That November,
chemical feed issues forced operators to shut down the OB Curtis plant, once again causing
the system pressure to drop. That boil water notice lasted another four days. In April 2022,
water hammer broke a pipe in the OB Curtis plant, again requiring a shutdown. In June,
filters at the plant failed, requiring yet another shutdown and yet another system-wide
boil water notice (this one for two weeks while the City worked to fix the problem).
In July, the EPA issued a report summarizing the litany of problems faced by the Jackson
water distribution system, and the list would be impressive if it didn’t represent such an
injustice to the people the system is meant to serve. Water mains were constantly breaking. The
City had an annual rate of 55 breaks per 100 miles of pipe when the industry benchmark is 15. There
was no monitoring of pressure, meaning the City had no way to identify or address problem areas
in the system. There was no map of the system pipes or valves, making it difficult or impossible
to implement repairs. Water towers weren’t getting enough flow, causing the water inside to
stagnate. Monitoring equipment in the treatment plants wasn’t working, and if it was working,
it wasn’t calibrated. And if it was calibrated, there wasn’t enough staff to keep an eye on it.
For an extended period, the utility had no manager, and it almost never
had enough operators to staff the plants. A treatment plant operator has to be licensed
and know a lot about chemistry and hydraulics and the various equipment used to clean water.
It’s usually a great career because it doesn’t require a college degree, the work is rewarding,
and the hours are consistent, but that wasn’t the case in Jackson. The City couldn’t pay enough to
keep the three shifts at each treatment plant staffed 7 days per week, so the operators that
were there were working lots of overtime, and occasionally not being paid for it.
Over the course of 4 years, the City had issued over 750 boil water notices because
of the numerous losses of pressure. Water meters throughout the City were broken or misconfigured,
meaning people weren’t being billed correctly or billed at all. In fact, the City estimated
its non-revenue water, that’s the water that isn’t being paid for because of leaks or bad metering,
to be 50 percent! Half of all the water treated and delivered into the distribution system was
just being lost; it wasn’t generating revenue that could be used to maintain infrastructure
and pay the staff. On top of that many of the large institutions that should be the
utilities biggest customers, including local schools and hospitals, had opted to drill their
own wells rather than rely on the failing city system, cutting off even more revenue.
It’s not hard to imagine why the system was having trouble keeping up.
Throughout the entire year after the federal inspection, the City had been in constant
negotiations with the state and the EPA trying to plot a path forward to bringing their ailing
water system back into compliance. Biweekly meetings that included representatives from
nearly every side of the issue were held to keep track of progress, but the progress was slow. In
August of 2022, the OB Curtis plant switched the chemicals used for corrosion control, resulting in
a boil water notice that lasted nearly a month. As the city worked to get the treatment process under
control, the mayor said in a press conference, “Even when we come out of this boil water notice,
I want to be clear that we are still in a state of emergency.” Then came the flood.
In late August, a deluge of heavy rainfall swept across Mississippi, dropping enormous volumes of
precipitation across the state. The Ross Barnett Reservoir was already full of water, meaning
all the inflows had to be released through the spillway. That swelled the Pearl River downstream,
flooding streets and homes throughout the city. You might think a flood would be a good thing
for a water system; after all, a flood is just a lot of water. But the problem with flooding is
sediment. Heavy runoff carries soil, making the water muddy and much more difficult to treat.
Several raw water pumps at OB Curtis quickly failed as they tried to deliver the sediment-laden
water to the plant. And the fraction of water that did make it all the way to the plant was still a
muddy mess. Any operator will tell you that slow changes to treatment processes and chemical feeds
are best. When there’s a sudden shift in water quality that requires rapid adjustments to the
processes, problems are bound to occur, and they did. Muddy water clogged filters and
upset the various other processes to the point where the plant was utterly unable to treat it,
resulting in a complete collapse of the system. The downstream surface water treatment plant
suffered a similar fate. Nearly everyone in Jackson lost the ability to use water for
basic safety and hygiene. Schools, restaurants, and businesses were closed. From washing hands
to fighting fires to just having water to drink, the City was incapacitated.
The flooding threw the water crisis into the national spotlight. The Mayor, the governor,
and eventually President Biden all issued disaster declarations, freeing up emergency resources.
Federal officials and emergency workers flooded into Jackson to deliver bottled water to the
residents and help restore the water supply. A team of engineers and drinking water experts
worked to tackle miscellaneous projects at both treatment plants and most importantly, staff the
facilities. By September 6, water pressure had been restored to customers, and a week later,
the boil water notice was lifted. But it wasn’t the end of the emergency. The water system was
barely functioning, and the relief team couldn’t stay in Jackson indefinitely. An emergency
contract was issued for an outside company to take over operations of the water system for a year,
but it was clear to everyone involved that an enormous capital improvement program and a huge
influx of cash was the only way Jackson could pull itself out of the crisis. The City continued
negotiating with the state, the EPA, and the Department of Justice, and in November of 2022,
they appointed a third-party manager to take over control of the water system.
Ted Henifin, a licensed engineer and former public works director from Virginia,
had already been involved in the emergency work, and was now tasked with 13 priority projects to
bring Jackson’s system back, if not into perfect working order, at least into compliance with the
drinking water laws. He was given broad power and freedom from normal contracting rules to hire,
purchase, and contract as needed to get the work done, and he said in November that he
planned to wrap up his priority projects within a year. And then the cold came.
The Christmas polar vortex event created a repeat of February 2021, cracking water mains
with freezing weather, and creating so many leaks that the water treatment plants just couldn’t
keep up. Jackson’s reliance on surface water creates a challenge because, unlike groundwater,
the surface water supply is affected by ambient temperature. Freezing weather means chilly
water in the reservoir, and when you’re sending very cold water through the underground mains,
it causes them to shrink, and in some cases, to break. The cold weather also affected the
chemistry of the raw water entering the plant, causing issues with the treatment processes and
forcing the OB Curtis Plant to shut down. 22 schools had little to no water pressure and had
to move to virtual learning as they returned from the winter break. For many, it was the last straw,
and at least one restaurant decided to close their doors for good after having no water
pressure for more than 40 days over the past two years, and many more days than that under boil
water notices. The Christmas outage had customers without water for two weeks in the latest,
but probably not the last event in the saga of underinvestment, misfortune,
and utter failure to deliver a basic necessity to the residents of Jackson.
I talk about the engineering behind catastrophes like this, but in so many cases, it’s impossible
to ignore the larger issues driving the story. Like all infrastructure, fresh water systems
require investment. In an ideal world, those resources come from the water rates,
the money that people pay for the water they receive, so the system supports itself. But,
when those rates aren’t enough, something has to be done quickly and decisively,
because chronic underinvestment creates a vicious cycle. The infrastructure fails,
the billing system doesn’t work, customers leave, staff positions can’t be filled,
and things just spiral downhill. So infrastructure funding is often supplemented by debt, by grants,
by state and federal investment programs, all resources that require more than good management;
they often require politicians. The people in charge of the water system in Jackson have
been trying to sound the alarms for years. The Mayor even said the city was in an emergency the
week before a flood hit the City that completely collapsed the water system. But it took that flood
to convince politicians to free up resources. It’s also impossible to ignore the history of Jackson
as a part of this story, including a legacy of racism that isolated and separated minorities,
gutted the community tax base, and ultimately led to the failing infrastructure we see now.
If you want to learn more about that history, there are far more qualified voices than mine
to tell it, so I’ll leave some links to the best sources I found below.
In January, the mayor of Jackson announced that they had secured $800 million dollars
in federal funding to tackle the city’s issues with water and sewer infrastructure. Those funds
will take years to allocate and spend, but it’s another step forward for a city whose
water system has fallen so far behind. Clean water is a human right, and the fact that the
citizens of a major city in the US don’t have access to it is more than a shame. I’m sharing
the story because I think it’s important for all of us to see the consequences of mismanagement,
disregard, and discrimination and hopefully learn from those mistakes so that we can be
better managers, leaders, or just advocates for the infrastructure that we rely on everyday.
And, actually, I’ve been telling stories about infrastructure for
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