Jackson, Mississippi, to go without reliable drinking water indefinitely
reuters.com
reuters.com
</sarc>
Meanwhile, it looks like some federal intervention, e.g., Army Corp of Engineers is likely needed.
More seriously, this is what we get when politicians chase "culture issues" and don't actually govern, and people care more about revenge on groups they don't like than electing people who will actually govern.
Seriously broken
It may surprise you to learn that Jackson is actually led by a quite liberal mayor: https://www.jacksonms.gov/departments/office-of-the-mayor/
* https://www.wlbt.com/2022/02/17/jackson-faces-uphill-battle-...
Maybe they are worried about the political implications of rising property taxes or water bills?
Seems like a HUGE failure by an inept local government.
here's a primer: - https://mississippitoday.org/2021/11/08/jackson-water-crisis... - https://mississippitoday.org/2021/03/24/why-jacksons-water-s... - https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/a-mississippi-citys-...
If you want to argue something else then please explain why local gov't even exists in the first place.
This is a primarily a failure of local government likely due to weak/inept leadership. Just because something like fixing your water supply is politically difficult or expensive doesn't mean you can ignore it.
So, they begged for outside money (again, for something that is their responsibility) and when that didn’t work stuck by their “do nothing and blame the state” strategy which ultimately created a humanitarian crisis that leaves federal taxpayers on the hook.
Did I miss anything?
The article i link says they’re getting ~10B from the feds so they’d need add a 15% tax rate on their 3M people earning avg of 25K to pay for that. On top of the 5% they have. Thank god for them 25K income is so low that they only pay federal tax rate of ~12%.
Maybe a poor state that voted against handouts and critiques others from getting outside funding should pay their own way?
Or maybe they’re too poor and need help from the rest of society and we should help them because it’s a kind human thing to do, and not judge them for their poor financial decisions.
https://mspolicy.org/mississippi-no-longer-the-state-most-re...
Huh? That isn't how that works at all. Cities issue bonds to raise the cash to pay for large projects. Those bonds are paid down over time or not at all if they just pay interest w/ no principle. A 10B project for a metro this size is a pretty manageable expense.
In this case, it seems like the local politicians simply didn't know how to do that or want to as raising taxes might make it difficult to get reelected.
The solution they seem to have arrived at is: Wait until things get so bad that there is a humanitarian crisis and the Feds have to bail us out. Which they will, because we don't want people to suffer without clean water.
So now the rest of us are made suckers as federal taxpayers are on the hook for this mismanagement/scam.
Considering how dependent the state is on funding, it’s not crazy to imagine that the local municipalities would also be similarly dependent.
Jackson surely knows how to raise bonds. In Dec2021 their water and sewer bond rating was put in the “B” range (Baa) for their existing 200M in debt for the water system.
Mississippi likely just has no more money from their existing population available. And has likely started to run out of availability debt accessible.
Ps: The “rest of us” surely are suckers paying for it, but it looks like we always were. I’m in California and I’d raise my own taxes by $12 just be able to brag to red states that California takes less in “government handouts” than them. But it doesn’t matter. We’re all in one big national union working together to help each other. It doesn’t matter who is paying and who is getting re-elected - those residents need water. And fwiw, it’s not like the fed balances the budget. That’s just “free money” anyways.
There can be good reasons to subsidize infrastructure - for example, urban residents help maintain a rural farming community because they desire the agricultural products.
It’s not even clear the entire state of Mississippi is “capable of taking care of themselves” as over 40 percent of their general operating revenue is supplied by the federal government (2017 numbers) which is consistently in the top five states for receiving federal aid.
I’m not an expert, but the defensiveness seems unwarranted.
Water supply is a local thing, and local leaders need to take responsibility, not blame the state.
https://rockinst.org/issue-areas/fiscal-analysis/balance-of-...
https://mspolicy.org/mississippi-no-longer-the-state-most-re...
The average per person income in Mississippi is like 25k so that 6k is not coming from the residents excess wealth.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/federal-aid...
When water does reach a house, only about 5-20% is used for cooking or drinking - the rest for watering plants, showers, toilet flushing, washing.
Is it better to just outfit each home with an under-sink reverse osmosis machine and pipe in raw reservoir water?
and all the RO membrane cartridges, or millipore filter cartridges are contaminated with PFAS, anyhow. it's literally everywhere. We have to run ours for 30 minutes before taking the ultra-pure water at the lab to drop the levels down to 'baseline'. Otherwise, the built up levels blow out the instruments.
These filters only slow down the contamination relative to water flow rate. Think Of them as big chromatography columns or frontal analysis columns
https://www.mississippifreepress.org/jackson-water-crisis-in...
> The city and state were both distributing bottled drinking water and non-potable water for toilets
Is there a risk to using untreated water from the river & reservoir to flush your toilets? Why would the city need to distribute toilet water?
Presumably they are shipping two types of water- potable and non-potable. The non-potable is less difficult to produce and ship.
You can flush a toilet by dumping a bucket of water into the bowl.
I also think its kinda crazy that humans have brought agriculture to a desert via irrigation and think that's sustainable. This is the type of thing where Federal laws/rulings are needed because there are like 4 states over consuming the water.
I think this illustrates that its sustainable on paper but the current sets of humans using the Colorado river water aren't using it sustainably though when its all added up. We can get pedantic about it but something has to change, right?
We need to make a conscious decision to recognize a balance is possible though and negotiate it. If we don't, the situation eventually devolves into the knife fight regardless.
Millennia? Do you have any references for this?
AFAIK the natives did not do large scale irrigation, I'll be interested to know if that was the case.
Further, my understanding is that we are getting out a multi-hundred year wet period for California and the Southwest. Before then it was particularly arid, and we are returning to that and then some. Which is all really unfortunate as most of the concentrated population settling there has been since the 1800s, when the climate was maximally accommodating.
This is a good listen/read.
2022 is a remarkable year, one of a striking tipping point: in which a large number of climate change cautionary tales moved from speculative to the front page.
As with the rapid evolution of AI txt2image tools, the notable stories, milestones, data points, are coming too quickly to keep up with.
Jackson has its own specific problems, and they aren't drought-specific as others noted ITT;
but the story is nonetheless a useful addition to the growing list of examples of where our institutional and structural response to ecological and climatological challengs is grotesquely inadequate.
As in Kim Stanley Robinson's fantasies, hope seems to lie in something which today seems as unlikely as our current headlines did a few years ago: an intervention of some kind which puts actual decision-making power in the hands of policy makers and scientists who understand what is happening and the scale of response required to ride it out as a civilization.
Those at the bottom bring supplies to the top and maintain it.
Those at the top are tasked with seeing what is coming and making Wise decisions.
Those at the top forget about the needs of the bottom and instead focus only on vertical expansion.
Eventually the summit grows taller than what the base can sustain.
Then the workers at the bottom abandon the base.
The tower left unmaintained, collapses.
https://www.newsweek.com/jackson-water-crisis-live-updates-1...