11.6.2: Case Study- The Jackson Water Crisis
The residents of Jackson, Mississippi are no strangers to boil-water advisories. The city has dealt with infrastructure problems for years; massive leaks, E. coli and lead concerns, and a lack of funding and staffing to maintain its aging water and sanitation facilities (Pettus, 2022). A cold snap in 2021, and heavy winter storms in 2022 caused pipes to burst and shut off water supplies to thousands (Adams, 2023). When heavy rains caused the nearby river to overflow in the summer of 2022, one of the city’s two water treatment facilities was compromised (Breslow, 2022). Since low water pressure allows bacteria and other contaminants to seep in through cracks in the aging pipes, residents were under yet another boil-water advisory, and bottled water was distributed (Pettus, 2022).
Jackson’s chronic water crisis demonstrates the complex interplay of social determinants of health, environmental health, public health policies, and politics. To begin with, 80% of the 150,000 residents in Jackson, Mississippi are Black, and a quarter of them (25%) are at or below the poverty threshold (Pettus, 2022). Mississippi has a long history of racism and white supremacy, with Jackson at the center of the Freedom Riders protest, when civil rights activists were arrested for riding segregated public transportation from DC (Contributors to Wikimedia projects, 2024). Jim Crow laws, housing discrimination and underinvestment in communities of color have disproportionately exposed Black populations to environmental hazards (USGCRP, 2023c). After the integration of schools in the 1960s, white families moved out of Jackson en masse over the next several decades - so called “white flight” to the surrounding suburbs (Wiggins & Morrow, 2022). For these and other reasons, tax income to the city has declined, and Jackson has long had problems with finding money to fix its infrastructure (Pettus, 2022), some of which is over 100 years old (SPLC, 2023). Jackson’s history of discrimination and underinvestment are compounded by emerging environmental factors. Climate change is contributing to more rainfall and severe storms - including hurricanes and more severe flooding in the southeast U.S. region (USGCRP, 2023c). While an EPA investigation into the recent water crisis concluded that state agencies did not racially discriminate against Jackson’s residents in distributing federal funds for infrastructure updates (Muhammad & Judin, 2024), it is clear that a combination of systemic and historic racism, poverty, policies, and climate change are contributing to the struggles Jackson is facing in providing clean water to its residents.