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| Photo Credit: AP. |
JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — A boil-water notice was lifted Thursday in Mississippi’s capital city after nearly seven weeks, Gov. Tate Reeves and Jackson officials said.
“We have
restored clean water,” Reeves said during a news conference.
But a state
health department official, Jim Craig, said concerns remain about copper and
lead levels in the Jackson water. Craig said people should continue to avoid
using city water to prepare baby formula.
Emergency
repairs are still underway after problems at Jackson’s main water treatment
plant caused most customers to lose service for several days in late August and
early September.
Problems
started days after torrential rain fell in central Mississippi, altering the
quality of the raw water entering Jackson’s treatment plants. That slowed the
treatment process, depleted supplies in water tanks and caused a precipitous
drop in pressure.
When water
pressure drops, there’s a possibility that untreated groundwater can enter the
water system through cracked pipes, so customers are told to boil water to kill
potentially harmful bacteria.
But even
before the rainfall, officials said some water pumps had failed and a treatment
plant was using backup pumps. Jackson had already been under a boil-water
notice for a month because the state health department had found cloudy water
that could make people ill.
The National
Guard and volunteer groups have distributed millions of bottles of drinking
water in Jackson since late August.
Jackson is
the largest city in one of the poorest states in the U.S. The city has a
shrinking tax base that resulted from white flight, which began about a decade
after public schools were integrated in 1970. Jackson’s population is more than
80% Black, and about 25% of its residents live in poverty.
Like many
American cities, Jackson struggles with aging infrastructure with water lines
that crack or collapse. Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba, a Democrat in a
Republican-led state, said the city’s water problems come from decades of
deferred maintenance.
Some
equipment froze at Jackson’s main water treatment plant during a cold snap in
early 2020, leaving thousands of customers with dangerously low water pressure
or no water at all. The National Guard helped distribute drinking water. People
gathered water in buckets to flush toilets. Similar problems happened on a smaller
scale earlier this year.
Jackson
frequently has boil-water notices because of loss of pressure or other problems
that can contaminate the water. Some of the mandates are in place for only a
few days, while others last weeks. Some only affect specific neighborhoods,
usually because of broken pipes in the area. Others affect all customers on the
water system.