Jackson’s water crisis: latest updates
wjtv.com
wjtv.com
The site was instrumental in uncovering the EPA reporting that the city tried to hide for more than a year and has direct sources involved in the operation of the plant.
Sounds like the mayor hid the EPA report from the city council. Not sure how something like that can happen.
This does show the strength of our federal system, though. The local politics had a failure by putting in this mayor who is well outside of mainstream politics. This resulted in problems, such as the the water system not being operated properly. Eventually, the state got involved and raised the alarm, but like any messenger, they took a few arrows for their efforts. Eventually the feds got involved, and the Army Corps was able to put things on a better path.
Do you have a citation for your claim that this is some of the best reporting?
Not completely disinterested, and maybe there are things about which you don't trust him, but his citations are excellent. Lots of raw data to work with.
I live locally.
I've been reading Kingfish's blog for a long time... since 2008. And it reminds me why I left Mississippi every time I look at it. Kingfish isn't a web developer or a technologist (hence the *.blogspot.com domain and not something along the lines of www.kingfish.news like those of us in tech would have).
Kingfish is a just your garden variety blogger. His identity is already known, and he's considered to be controversial, but a truth teller: https://www.jacksonfreepress.com/news/2017/jan/23/city-vetti...
He leans conservative, and although the so-called 'elite' media outlets consider that to be a crime nowadays, it isn't.
At least they are not spitting in my face and telling me that I matter and they would loooove to be available in my region. I like this concise message better.
Here's a mirror for the poor souls like me: https://archive.ph/sdyh3
it seems to be for sites like archive.to anyway
These are entire networks doing this probably running a core CMS.
The fixed engineering cost is the problem here.
This obviously won't help if you for example sell your backend access.log to the highest bidder, or do backend tracking somehow.
But it would be embarrassing to admit they can make such a thing.
The problem that Europeans can’t read their news without ads is not a problem they want to solve. They don’t want people reading their news without ads.
Given that premise, there's no reason to want Europeans blocked other than spite or embarrassment.
Simply not caring enough to put in extra effort wouldn't look so bad, but that's why I'm pointing out there's no real difference in effort.
Yes, there is another reason: legal liability under GDPR.
if(maxmind.lookup(request.ip).isInEU()) { return 451 }
if(maxmind.lookup(request.ip).isInEU()) { return $body_text }
> It is way easier than setting up some alternative revenue stream and ensuring that it is compliant.
The premise of this comment chain is already that we are NOT setting that up. My previous comment was NOT suggesting we set one up.
Monetarily, both solutions are approximately equal: get fined zero dollars and make zero dollars. This is all they care about.
You may have a preference for one solution over the other, but this doesn’t mean they do.
I think that the solution that they chose demonstrates quite well that they just simply don’t care.
WJTV’s signal doesn’t even reach across the entire state of Mississippi. Why do you think they even for a moment considered EU visitors to their website? Nobody from the EU wants to know about traffic detours, city council elections, or the weather for the morning commute in Jackson Mississippi. EU readership just isn’t even remotely relevant to their operations.
They made an active choice. Calling their choice "lack of motivation" is not right. They wanted to take the ruder option.
1. If GDPR applies to you and you are not in the Union you must have a designated representing in the Union to receive GPDR requests (both from individuals wishing to exercise their GDPR rights and from regulators). So right off the bat you have to engage some service in the Union to handle that for you. There are such services that aren't very expensive, but it is something you have to deal with.
2. IP addresses are personal data according to many GDPR experts. Normal logging that is done by most web servers leaves you with a GDPR burden to deal with. It seems likely that storing this would be allowed without the need to obtain explicit consent because there is a legitimate business interest to that logging, but you still have to deal with requests from people to delete their data. So more hassle.
3. You will have to keep up with developments as regulators rule on the meaning if the tons of subjecting things in GDPR.
If you are not in the Union but people who are in the Union use your site GDPR applies if either you are:
A. offering goods or services to them (free or paid), or
B. monitoring their behavior as far as their behavior takes place in the Union.
For A you have to envisage offering goods or services to them. The mere fact that they can reach your site and use it is not sufficient.
If you aren't monitoring behavior in a way that makes B apply, then whether or not GDPR applies comes down to whether or not you envisaged offering goods and services to people in the Union. That's a fairly subjective thing and I don't think there have been enough cases involving that yet for it to be clear just what that means.
Blocking EU visitors makes it clear you did not envisage serving them saving you all the aforementioned hassles and annoyances.
If you're confident enough that you have a non-tracking response to EU citizens, then you already did the hard part, and you might as well dump the article contents into that response.
There's a recital (Recital 24) that elaborates on that part of GDPR. From that:
> In order to determine whether a processing activity can be considered to monitor the behaviour of data subjects, it should be ascertained whether natural persons are tracked on the internet including potential subsequent use of personal data processing techniques which consist of profiling a natural person, particularly in order to take decisions concerning her or him or for analysing or predicting her or his personal preferences, behaviours and attitudes.
A simple IP based location block doesn't seem like it really fits that, and so wouldn't snare you via the "monitoring of their behavior as far as their behavior takes place within the Union" part of the GDPR's territorial scope article (Article 3 section 2(b)).
If that's the case, then whether or not GDPR applies comes down to whether or not you envisaged offering goods and services to people in the Union (Article 3 section 2(a) and Recital 23).
Blocking would be intended to show that you did not envisage doing so. That gets you out of needing to have a representative in the Union and needing to deal with data deletion requests.
They burden sites & users with billions of extra meaningless interactions every month for no net gain in privacy – and possibly a net loss, by training users to habitually dismiss such popups without thought.
Can you point out a few prominent sites using your preferred approach, so I'm sure what you mean?
In our actual world, the disclosure/opt-in requirement is a major burden, because essentially all of the practicioner/implementers, and the specialist firms now powering disclosure popups, have decided their best way to comply is the first-load pop-up mess we've got now. (That's likely because: there's immense value in being able to track sessions-of-use, for adjusting design, even before any commerce or specific-identity info is disclosed. And that value flows not just to the websites: it helps adjust content/UI for the users, as well.)
Given the actual, observed state-of-the-world, for years now, it would make more sense for the singlular governing entity that created the problem – the EU – to fix this, rather than the millions of diverse websites worldwide.
At the very least, the EU could waive the opt-in requirements for any browser which offers some baseline of user-controlled cookie-blocking – which the ~half-dozen relevant browser engines could easily add. That'd be a far more rational, low total compliance cost, high user-agency solution.
Competition & user self-help had practically wiped annoying modal popups from the web. Then the EU's clumsy, oblivious regulators brought them back.
Tracking (regardless of whether cookies or other methods are used - the dumb idea that GDPR only cares about cookies needs to die) for essential purposes such as maintaining state for shopping carts/user preferences/etc does not require disclosure nor consent.
The problem is a lack of enforcement so widespread that entire businesses now specialize (and thrive!) in providing non-compliant consent flows as a service.
Someone from Europe visits my page. How am I responsible for something they do?
Some localities have dedicated funding sources for the water system, and some localities pull the funding from the general fund. As an example, my water bills are paid directly to a water company, which is a public utility company that handles all the water stuff. Other cities might issue the bills, collect the water money, and spend it on "something else."
The main issue IMO is that maintenance can be expensive, and nobody really notices if you defer maintenance for 30 years until the system fails. Until then you can spend that water money on pet projects and retire. At that point it's someone else's problem.
The same issue occurs with road and bridge maintenance, which are usually prime targets for politicians looking for money to fund their projects. Very few cities in the US spend enough money on road/bridge/infrastructure maintenance, because other constituencies want that money.
In many ways that's why water districts that are politically independent are better, but I've never seen any actual surveys on that.
Many suburban towns rely on growth for a large portion of their revenue. When growth eventually slows they no longer have enough money coming in to the meet their maintenance costs. Strong Towns calls this the “Growth Ponzi Scheme”:
- https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/8/28/the-growth-pon...
- https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/5/14/americas-growt...
In these areas, what is left is often essentially government welfare. The area runs on social-security checks (which go a long way with cheap cost-of-living, as long as gas prices aren't too high) and government jobs - prisons, military installations, civil positions. And I'm not talking about farm areas etc - that's a local industry too, there are a lot of ex-rural areas where it's almost completely unimproved, the types of places surrounding national forests etc.
What's more, these regions tend to be extremely infrastructure-heavy, there are a lot of miles of road and power-lines per resident, and while sure they don't have sewer, the US's road and power and communications infrastructure are heavily state- and federal-subsidized, state and federal governments chip in a lot on road and power spending. It's effectively a massive transfer of wealth out to regions that are economically unproductive, and while you can argue for or against that as a position, it's pretty unquestionable that money flows out of urban centers and into rural ones, both from government spending and also from service mandates that benefit these uneconomic operating areas (eg in power/telcom).
It's another whole layer on the "growth ponzi scheme" - sometimes the ponzi doesn't just lose its growth, but the market can collapse underneath it too. And it's exceedingly rare that the government entities themselves ever are dissolved as a result - the expectation is that government services are a one-way ratchet.
Just got my two Strong Towns books yesterday, looking forward to diving in!
Isn't that a good argument that it should be run by the state government instead?
Local government in the US has so much power, compared to many other countries. It makes you wonder if that's a mistake, and if greater centralisation would produce better outcomes.
Sometimes, the state has other skewed motives and will spend the money received from federal governement for unintended causes. This happened in Missouri as well.
Mississippi used welfare money for needy families to pay Brett Favre for motivational speeches
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/mississippi-welfare-...
I get the impression that governments in the US are unusually corrupt, at least by the standards of the English-speaking world.
You give it to their re-election fund. Because that is free speech.
In the USA, private sector can provide much better housing, and much better jobs, for most people, so anyone capable of leaving the public ones does. So, public housing eventually becomes dominated by the least functional members of society, and public sector, with the exception of the idealists and the corrupt, mostly retains the incompetents.
The process is self-perpetuating too. Govt aside, in a tech company it's really hard to maintain a semi-crappy department given that people can leave - either it needs to be cleaned up and fixed, or the best developers will leave and it will just become crappy.
I think there are reports of bad water fairly often in First Nations communities, but I haven't followed the topic too closely. Some recent information: https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/first-nations-water-drink...
And another one I sort of remember more than 20 years ago was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkerton_E._coli_outbreak
But these seem to pale in comparison to the limited stories I've heard out of the US. The Flint water crisis, and some of the poorer communities in the US. I do believe water systems are incredibly expensive infrastructure, even for those of us living next to the great lakes.
Looking at major English speaking countries – New Zealand comes 1st as least corrupt country in world (equal with Denmark and Finland); UK is 11th; Canada and Ireland are equal 13th (along with Austria, Estonia and Iceland); Australia is equal 18th (with Belgium, Japan and Uruguay). The US is equal 27th, with Chile. So yes, among major English-speaking countries, the US is the most corrupt.
https://mobile.twitter.com/nntaleb/status/144068888518967706...
The short answer is 'Yes'.
The long answer is 'Yes, they do.' It may be more prevalent in the US, because of its particular political climate, but its omnipresent.
Looking at https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2021/index/usa I'm worried by how much more corrupt we became after Trump got into power.
So there have been multiple generations of Americans who have marinated in this their entire lives, resulting in large populations who assume more local control is always better, people only deserve what they can afford themselves individually, and so on—and entire societal systems built atop the ensuing systematic deprivation.
At the same time, there’s also an almost North Korean degree of jingoistic “we’re the pinnacle of human achievement” nationalism so any change to the status quo is opposed even by those who would directly benefit because they don’t really believe it’s possible for things to be any better. After all, if they could be, they would be, because We’re The Best! So if things are bad, well, they’re worse everywhere else so quit complaining.
This is why Americans get such culture shock going elsewhere in the world. They see that others can actually have a society that’s just as good or better, and they have to figure out how to integrate that into their worldview.
TL;DR: Many things in the US stay as bad as they do because multiple generations have been brainwashed into thinking they’re the best they can be.
We give government special protections that prevent public accountability because it's expected that democracy effectively puts competent people into office. We are continually proving this to be wrong. Our election and powers structure is not accurate to the voter base. Most of these positions go in challenged, because people can't quit their job to fill a government role.
Further, private companies can't keep passing the ball like governments do. They can't pull from other funds, and they have contracted duties. Even better if the company is a co-op.
Tricky to swim in English rivers or beaches at the moment because they're covered in human shit. We have privatised water companies, and there's a good argument that privatisation made it worse.
People on HN think privatisation solves everything, despite the countless examples that show otherwise.
This statement is outright wrong. See this table[0] for details.
[0] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/mapped-immigration-by-co...
Apologies for misinterpreting you.
Some of Europe fluoridates tap water. Much of Europe has adequate fluoride levels naturally. Some countries supply fluoride in table salt instead of water. Some have insufficient natural fluoride levels and do nothing. Some have too much fluoride naturally in their water.
You've just illustrated why so many people dislike "the elites". The public are adults. They decide what's in their interests and what isn't, even if it isn't what you think it should be.
In the fifth grade, I was sent home as punishment for not saying the "Pledge of Allegiance" in public school.
It's always been about brainwashing. Always has.
> You've just illustrated why so many people dislike "the elites". The public are adults. They decide what's in their interests and what isn't, even if it isn't what you think it should be.
I've seen what an adult is. "You've been alive for 18 years". That's it. No knowledge checks. No requirement of anything, really.
And your response cements this pervasive idea that "My ignorant opinion is worth just as much as your well studied scientific opinion". That's what our society is facing right now, on every public forum.
the most striking experience of this i was able to observe in US boy scouts. there were two boys of similar age who were close friends, until one of them turned 18. he then was made an assistant scout master. some time later the two friends had a falling out because the younger one did not respect his older friend as a leader. it's not that he wasn't qualified as a leader. they probably both were, but that birthday made one be the leader of the other, instead of allowing them to remain peers.
Your "well studied scientific opinion" is nothing more than propaganda of a more refined form. Or at least it flatters you to call it "refined."
I don't remember the details, but at some point Flint changed its water supplier over the protests of the water bureau. Different water -> different chemical composition -> more leaching (wikipedia says it was in 2014).
However, having services run by larger jurisdictions is directly at odds with the American need to ensure that the "haves" have distinctly better living conditions than the "have nots," and so this is a political non-starter. Put another way: poor services (such as healthcare, schools, and even potable water) are a design feature, not a bug, of American civics.
There was a fire at the water treatment plant in Jackson about a year and a half ago. It took the main water pumps offline, leaving the city with only the smaller emergency backup pumps.
The city refused to repair the damage. The EPA stepped in, but a bit too late.
>Jackson has 45 days to tell the EPA how and when it will repair damage caused by a fire that broke out last April at the O.B. Curtis Water Treatment Plant.
This week, the Environmental Protection Agency issued a notice of noncompliance to the city for failing to repair or replace a damaged electrical panel at the plant.
In addition to telling EPA when and how repairs will be made, the city also must meet with the federal regulatory agency to “show cause why the EPA should not initiate legal proceedings” against the city as a result.
The notice comes about nine months after a fire broke out at the O.B. Curtis plant, shutting down the plant’s high-service pumps.
During a November 8, 2021 inspection of the facility, “the pumps remained out of service, with no target date by the city to put the pumps back into service,” the letter states. “The loss of the pumps has caused multiple elevated tanks to be low or empty and has caused certain areas of the distribution system to have sustained low water pressure.”
https://www.wlbt.com/2022/01/28/epa-cites-jackson-failing-re...
The emergency backup pumps eventually failed too, and the city had no water.
That's the weirdest part. Why?!
Mississippi is a very poor and underdeveloped state.
Cities are blue and so in a red state the government sits back and lets it fail, while the federal government is powerless to intervene until the point of failure. Many other factors layer on top but this is the core of the issue.
Interestingly where I grew up in the U.K. this situation would be impossible because the cities boomed in the Victorian era and so are more compact while the administrative boundary of the city spans a much larger area, including suburbs of the core city itself, so the rise of motorcar suburbanites did not deprive the city of its tax base. We experienced the same trend - the collapse of industry in parallel with the rise of the motorcar leading to wealthy suburbs and a poor urban core. But we had the money to invest in redevelopment.
Many US suburbs choose to incorporate into their own “cities”, in order to avoid being administered by the county, or annexed by a nearby city, so that they may tax commerce (think local strip mall or big box) instead of just property.
Even then, though, cities cannot usually tax outside their boundaries, and county tax rates will be lower (often much, although you're also going to get rural levels of government services in return for your rural-level taxes - the suburbs generally have their own police, schools, fire, etc., rather than relying on the county).
In Flint's case, their local government just did something stupid. That's not a "pattern of poor water quality."
Local governments are given more freedom than in many other countries. Most areas of the US are just fine; I have never lived somewhere with dangerous water.
Everyone everywhere could use more money, but in both cities the fault was at the central pumping station, and was not due to a lack of money.
Jackson wants $1 bil to replace every pipe in their city - that might be nice to do, but it's not what caused the failure.
I imagine the response, in most cases, to a party asking the other to sacrifice a core interest for an infrastructure win is "you can't use 'providing basic services to your constituents' as a bargaining chip, you should want to do that anyway."
... which they can't keep up on. So in 20-40 years, the water supply and roads and other infrastructure decline without any means for replacement.
Sure, perhaps with intelligent setting aside of funds, localities could handle it, but that kind of long term thinking is really hard to expect to happen across all local governments without some sort of federal mandate. Plus, there is always a hidden assumption that you let things get bad and wait for a federal bailout. In some ways, some dramatic crisis like this is exactly as planned.
Finally, we are talking about Mississippi. The South is unquestionably more corrupt at the local and state levels, going back to the reconstruction and post reconstruction eras after the civil war and the intense entrenched racism.
All you really need to do is look at how the South collects more federal aid than blue states, yet Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi routinely rank in the bottom ten for public education by states. Their universities are noteworthy for SEC football and little else.
Things are compounded by the fact that these are frankly really really poor states. It is a bit unfair to cast them as horribly corrupt when Illinois and New York also aren't exactly poster children. BUT, Louisiana/Alabama/Mississippi don't have floods of northerners enriching them like Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina. People do go to New Orleans for tourism, but that's about it, and I'd posit that New Orleans likely still has not recovered from Hurricane Katrina.
Finally, politically these states are owned by vehemently far right anti-government Republicans, and have been for decades. They are all horrendously gerrymandered, so reform is basically impossible. As California shows, when any party has long term control of a government, corruption and incompetence results, and it's only worse when one of the pillars of your party is to hate the government you run. Which gives full license to corruption.
It's extremely misleading to portray the dichotomy as between "the south" and "blue states". Note that red states outside of the south generally score very highly on metrics like income, educational outcomes, quality of life, quality of infrastructure, net tax receipts, etc.
The thing that makes southern states shitty is not the fact that they're red. You can tease out the Simpson's paradox here - go ahead and check average federal aid receipts in southern states after splitting the population by political affiliation. There's a very blue subpopulation in southern states that accounts for a vastly disproportionate fraction of federal spending.
> yet Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi routinely rank in the bottom ten for public education by states
Why do you qualify this with "yet"? This is perfectly expected if you understand the causal factors here.
You are generally correct on why and to whom the money goes to in these states, but the fact remains that money goes to these states and not a lot of progress happens. You can say it's the usual intractability of poverty, but at some point you take "Republican State/Local Government" + "Federal Funds" and see they get squandered.
And thus, black water from faucets.
There are lots of federal funds (thanks to congress) that isn't directly dispensed to citizens. Instead it gets granted to the states for their oversight and control, I believe Medicaid works like this, or it did at some point. I leave it as an exercise to the reader as to what happens to state-allocated federal funds in a deeply racist state with gerrymandering specifically designed to maintain white control of government.
What are the causal factors?
It's a State problem to fix with incentives or mandates.
Forget the US constitution entirely, in the abstract why should a country not mandate that if a municipality provide water service, that it be safe to drink? Is that inherently different from setting minimum standards for pollution etc? The water's still unsafe to drink regardless of the cause.
It seems like often there's an "is/ought" thing going on with Americans, people look at the design of the american system and say that X feature is great, without considering the actual impact that feature has had.
The US does mandate this.
https://www.epa.gov/dwreginfo/drinking-water-regulations
And the EPA started taking action in Jackson more than a year ago: https://www.epa.gov/ms/jackson-ms-drinking-water
The problem is that local leaders have the ability to just suck at their job and not make smart long term decisions. And often, this is caused by local opinions about spending priorities and opinions on the role of government.
Most others do fine.
You can have water infrastructure with minimal money if you spend money wisely. If you have plenty of money you can mismanage your money with little consequence. It’s when you have both mismanagement and limited funds that problems arise.
Regional balkanization has a lot of issues; not only are poor areas left with few resources and projects lack coordination and get expensively duplicated, but also they tend to compete with each other to offer tax breaks to companies, and in the end the region gives a big tax break to a company that most likely would’ve located somewhere in the region anyways.
The Corps got it running in a couple days. It was incompetence that caused the problem, and I doubt you will argue that poor people are less smart.
It's not a "smart or not smart" thing: wealthy areas demand (and receive) adequate attention and funding for their public utilities. Incompetence on the municipal level is a symptom.
And yes, Flint's water crisis was absolutely connected to a lack of funds. It was directly precipitated by the city's declaration of a financial emergency[1], which in turn caused the city to seek cheaper water sources.
[1]: https://www.mlive.com/news/flint/2011/11/former_acting_mayor...
Providing drinking water to a population is one of the archetypal roles of military engineers.
Maybe not globally – gendarmerie come to mind – but certainly in the English-speaking world?
Seems perfect for response to natural disasters, which seem to be becoming more common these days.
The military is about much much more than fighting/killing.
I know it's a controversial project, but the alternative -- to let the Mississippi divert itself away from New Orleans and Baton Rouge -- would be an unthinkable economic (and social) catastrophe. So I don't think it can be chalked up to mere incompetence.
(Yes, I know and agree that the ORCS has been environmentally destructive. But what's a workable alternative?)
This is perfectly workable, while I understand YMMV
> would be an unthinkable economic (and social) catastrophe.
Not only is it thinkable, it could be done responsibly, today. The ORCS will continue to fail (at irregular intervals), which will cause catastrophe as these events do. At some point, it will be decided that the system is no longer worth maintaining. Might as well rip the band-aid off by setting a specific date and start making a graduated change. If you didn't move out after Katrina[1], I don't think you can be convinced anyway.
[1] there was a 29% reduction in New Orleans population, post katrina
How?
You have a metro area of 1.3 million which is totally economically dependent on the river. A huge volume of freight moves through the delta daily. Billions of dollars of port infrastructure have been built in New Orleans and Baton Rouge.
Even disregarding the social cost -- which would be huge, given the high levels of poverty in New Orleans -- the pure economic cost would quickly rack into the tens or hundreds of billions. And tens of billions more would be required to make the new course navigable, rebuild port infrastructure, build new cities to serve the port, relocate workers from other parts of the country, etc.
And even then the river could just change its course again in two years or twenty or fifty.
New Orleans and Baton Rouge would see one of the most dramatic economic implosions seen in the modern world. Akin to, and possibly worse, than the hollowing out of many formerly prosperous rust belt cities.
There would also most likely be a lot of people displaced by allowing the Mississippi/Atchafalaya to meander at will, since the channels to handle that amount of water if left to its own devices are simply not there. You'd end up with an absolutely enormous floodplain between the current paths of those two rivers. My family is from the bayous between that area. The highest place in town was an artificial hill in a park 20-30 feet high.
All in all, it's probably better ecologically to simply let the rivers meander as they will, but economically it is in the city, state, and region's best interests to maintain the status quo.
Lead poisoning is not so easy to fix. You have to replace extensive amounts of lead pipe and/or find and remedy another source and then treat the existing poisoning which doctors aren't so talented at.
Most doctors aren't well versed in chelation protocols. Even if you replace all the lead pipes, the problem isn't resolved. You still need medical care.
https://cityofflint.wpengine.com/progress-report-on-flint-wa...
Anyway, you'd expect the federal government to be able to repair a water treatment facility in a tiny city within a few days.
The "crisis" referred to appears to mean the recent loss of pressure throughout the system, which happened after the boil water advisory, active since July 29th. The boil water advisory should be considered a crisis of its own, I agree, but the loss of pressure meant many could not get even basic washing and toilet use done, which made international news.
The article is written in a difficult to follow reverse chronological format, but it is clear from its contents that ~24 hours after the arrival of the Corps (at a time when other services were already working on the problem and had likely made big progress), pressure in the system was increased to about 86 psi and nearly the entire system had water supply again: the immediate, primary, news-worthy crisis was then resolved, and has since stayed resolved.
Beyond that, work has been done to achieve the higher target pressure desired (also done), get production up and clean out contaminated tanks and beds (mostly done), and to set things up for the full test needed to remove the advisory (not yet done, but anticipated to be soon).
The headline is a strange fact to pick out in all this, but it does seem to be essentially true.
(This isn't a knock on the regulation--it actually makes a lot of sense. A loss of water pressure means that groundwater can seep into the water pipes where previously clean water was leaking into groundwater, and it will take a couple of days for any such intruded groundwater to be flushed out of the water pipes. This is merely me trying to point out that a boil water advisory being maintained after a pressure loss doesn't contradict the possibility that the problem has actually been fixed.)
From you news you might imagine they had some huge disaster that would take weeks to fix, but actually it's pure incompetence.
My spouse was in a leadership position in a municipal water utility for several years. You have to make capital investments to maintain pumps, filtration systems and have operational funds to perform testing and repairs.
Municipal government often struggles with capital investment, especially in states that tightly regulate the ability of cities to bond or wherever the governor has the ability to control municipal authorities. There’s a “starve the beast” philosophy in some quarters that creates issues like this.
Money is usually the root cause. Incompetence is usually the result.
Another common dumb move is selling the water system to a private entity. Because governments are both more efficient and have a lower cost structure for raising capital, in the long run that leads to higher utility rates and deferred investment.
Chattanooga, TN has a similar size and no water crisis. As does dozens of other similarly sized towns. Other towns in Mississippi also don’t have the issue.
Water is entirely a municipal responsibility and Jackson is a horribly run city.
https://www.mississippifreepress.org/26791/no-efforts-to-rec...
The second article never alleges corruption. It does say Governor Reeves "[never spoke] to the mayor directly about the ongoing crisis." I'm not sure if the whole crisis is about the number of water operators, which it focuses on.
Sounds like a short timeframe to me?
Submitters: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."
You're mistaking the tiny population of 150,000 or so as a proxy for it's size.
I’ve seen everything from completely irreparable forever to already fixed being reported within days of each other.
Ask people in Jackson, they'll tell you it's the evil Republican leaders' faults.
Ask all the people that moved out of Jackson to the surrounding cities of Madison, Ridgeland, Flowood, etc. and they'll tell you it's corruption in the city legislature.
The very wealthy enclave of people who are keeping the barbarians at the gate of Eastover are staying, but not for long. Even though these people own houses that are 100+ years old - many of them family homes - they know it's only a matter of time until some drugged up lowlife stumbles into their yard and causes trouble. I don't know what'll become of all those beautiful homes in Eastover, but if this continues, I guess they'll be sold on the cheap and written off as a loss?
Looks like it's already happening - https://www.trulia.com/p/ms/jackson/2733-quail-run-rd-jackso...
You'll know for sure it's bad when the Holmans move out of Jackson, if they haven't already. If you're wondering who they are, watch the movie The Help. Hilly Holbrook is based on Sondra Holman, although of course they'll deny it to their dying day.
If, when you said, "look who's moving out and look who's staying", you meant "black people are staying and white people are moving out," that's not really accurate, it's that there's a significant Venn diagram overlap with poor people and black people. Jackson has been around 80% black for a *very* long time now. It really is just coming down to "those with money" and "those without money".
Note that "more" does not mean "complete".