In the summer of 2015, officials in Jackson, Mississippi sent the state a series of water samples taken at different locations throughout the city’s public water system. Residents had complained for weeks about the low pressure in their taps, 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 informing the city about the public health risk, they sat on the data for half a year. Unwittingly, residents continued to drink toxic water.
Officials in the Environmental Protection Agency were unaware of the problem until they inspected the city’s water system in February and March of 2020. While in Jackson, they found a network of pipes plagued by leaks, poor corrosion control, and elevated lead levels. These “persistent and concerning 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, causing several areas of the city to go without water for weeks. Then, in August 2022, the city’s main water treatment plant failed due to heavy flooding, precipitating a high-profile public health crisis that captured the attention of the nation. To this day, some residents don’t feel that they can depend on the system to deliver safe drinking water.
For years, none of the stakeholders with some authority over Jackson’s water system has taken full accountability for the water crisis. The state government has long blamed city officials for mismanaging the system and violating the Safe Drinking Water Act. City office holders have blamed the state for rejecting their repeated requests for funds to improve the failing infrastructure. The EPA has had a role to play as well. In May, a report from the Project for Government Oversight found that EPA regulators had for years 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, or OIG, 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 deficiencies that kept local and federal officials in the dark about the dire conditions of the city’s water system, the report found. Beyond that single incident, the inspector general reported that MSDH officials repeatedly failed to document financial and technical capacity challenges; address systemic deficiencies like excessive distribution line breaks and boil water notices; or notify the city about any of the issues they identified. These practices “obscured the long-standing challenges of the system, allowed issues to compound over time, and contributed to the system’s failure,” the report read.
Dominic DeLeo, a local clean water advocate and long-time Jackson resident, told Grist that it wasn’t fair to blame city officials for problems they didn’t fully understand. Over the past half century, Jackson has suffered a long period of decline, the result of deindustrialization and white flight that stripped the 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 nation. City officials seem to have had some information about how Jackson’s water system was failing. For years leading up to the water crisis, the city’s Department of Public Works had raised the alarm over persistent budget deficits and staffing shortages that made it impossible to address issues with the water system.
In 2016, Jackson’s city council declined to institute a civil emergency to deal with persistent water issues so as to not raise alarm among the public. “What we don’t want is to have people in the city concerned or any of our customers concerned 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 hanging on by our fingertips.” 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 failed to route funds from the federal Drinking Water State Revolving Fund to the city to diagnose and address its water issues. Had the EPA been alerted of the issues in Jackson sooner, the agency could have taken proactive steps, like providing more oversight to MSDH or making sure emergency federal funds got to Jackson more quickly, to prevent the kind of system-wide failures that rattled Jackson in subsequent years. One of the problems state regulators omitted in their annual reports was the persistent boil water notices that Jackson residents had to contend with in the years leading up to the crisis. The city would post these notices when pressure in residents’ taps fell, the result of leaks throughout the water system. On average, distribution networks should experience no more than 15 breaks per 100 miles of line every year, according to the OIG. In Jackson, the system experienced an average of 55 line breaks per 100 miles between 2017 and 2021.
The findings of the report offer validation to Jackson residents who have long felt abandoned by the state.
“I wish that [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’s just been 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 the conditions in Jackson improved. Last year, the Biden administration secured an unprecedented $600 million in emergency funds for Jackson to repair its treatment plants and distribution network. While some local residents have reported marked improvements in their water pressure over the past year, others continue to report off-colored, smelly tap water. But the main problem with Henifin’s tenure, city advocates told Grist, is the opaqueness of his spending.
Henifin has full authority to decide how to allocate the infusion of federal dollars that Jackson was awarded last year. Shortly after beginning his new role, the engineer created a company called JXN Water to facilitate his overhaul of the system, prompting concerns about privatization. According to Themba and DeLeo, many residents have seen their utility bills spike since the engineer took over the system. Despite repeated requests for information on how the $600 million is being spent, the only information about the water system that local advocates can reliably get is from the quarterly reports that Henifin delivers to the federal judge who appointed him. This lack of transparency compelled a coalition of local advocacy groups to petition the EPA to enter its lawsuit against the city of Jackson. That request was granted earlier this year. And still, Themba told Grist, they have yet to view Henifin’s budget.
The OIG’s report includes 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 has not released an official statement on the report, but told the Mississippi Free Press and ProPublica last week that it is reviewing the document.
DeLeo told Grist that the main reason things were improving in some parts of Jackson was not 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 has rarely worked out in the city’s favor.
“Should Jackson officials have addressed all the problems that the EPA said they should address?” DeLeo asked. “Yes. Did they have the means or the resources to? No. At some point the question becomes, whose fault is that?”
