Every day, I take for granted roughly a thousand things. This is fairly universal (I’m sure you do it, too! nojudgment), so I try not to beat myself up for it. It’s just difficult to fully appreciate something that’s there for you consistently, right up until it’s not there anymore — or until you encounter someone who never had it in the first place.
Clean drinking water was readily available for in 2020, which seems impressive until you do the math: The remaining 3% translates to roughly 9 million people who don’t have reliable sources of clean drinking water. That hardship is <more likelyfor people of color who are elderly, poor and reside in rural areas, otherwise known as the exact same groups who bear the brunt of nearly every societal problem in this country.
This is known as environmental injustice, and you can watch it unfolding now in Jackson, Mississippi, where one of two city water-treatment plants failed after a deluge of rainfall flooded a nearby river in late August. Water pressure plummeted in the city, leaving residents unable to bathe, hydrate or flush their toilets. The pressure has since been restored, according to the city, but drinking water remains unsafe for 150,000 people.
 Water pressure was restored to some areas of Jackson earlier this month, allowing residents to do some fun things like “chores,” but not other fun things like “hydrate.” |
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Jackson, the state’s capital city, is home to 163,000 residents. Eighty-two percent of them are Black, a statistic that civil rights activists characterized as unsurprising. Water quality issues tend to cluster in areas of “white flight and corporate disinvestment,” officials told the Michigan Advance. “There is an overall issue that this country hasn’t been able to come to terms with,” said the Rev. Charles Williams II, Michigan chapter chair of the National Action Network. “And that’s making sure that we have strong ecological infrastructure.” Williams saw firsthand the effects of water hardship in Flint, the majority-Black city in central Michigan where residents suffered lead poisoning and a host of other long-term health ailments after the municipal water supply was contaminated in 2014. The crisis began after officials switched the city’s water source to the Flint River as a cost-saving measure without first adding corrosion inhibitors to the aging pipes, allowing lead to leach into the supply. |
 New water pipes being installed in a place that is not Flint, Michigan. |
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There’s been little accountability since. Nine officials were indicted for their role in Flint’s water crisis, but those charges were invalidated in June when the Michigan Supreme Court decided that state law did not authorize the judge to issue indictments. Two months later, a jury deadlocked during deliberations in a lawsuit that sought to hold engineering companies responsible for allegedly negligent advisory work on the city’s water system, leading to a mistrial. Meanwhile, water quality issues continue to plague other majority-Black cities, all with similarly unsatisfying resolutions and bungled responses from state and local officials. That includes Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves, who is overseeing the state’s response to a situation he may have avoided altogether by accepting federal funding to upgrade the city’s water infrastructure. The Republican had been offered “every single thing available” to fix the problem, President Joe Biden said earlier this month. Mandatory federal aid arrived in Jackson days later in the form of a team from the Environmental Protection Agency tasked with conducting a “multidisciplinary” review of the water crisis. The investigators will report to the EPA’s Office of Inspector General, an independent team with a dedicated funding stream for audits and probes to weed out “fraud, waste, abuse, mismanagement and misconduct,” Mississippi Today reported. |
 State and local officials at a water distribution site in Jackson on Sept. 1, probably not having a water-cooler conversation. |
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The city’s mayor said Monday that he had instructed municipal employees to comply with the probe but wasn’t privy to the details of its focus. But federal investigators conducted a similar inquiry in Flint, resulting in a scathing 2018 report that recommended beefing up EPA oversight of state drinking water programs. As of May, the agency had not fully implemented those changes, according to a follow-up report from the inspector general. Nothing about that is surprising — officials often need to be beaten over the head with an issue to even acknowledge its existence. Take climate change, which began as a theory in the 19th century and was a common topic among scientists decades before it entered the political lexicon in 1988 as part of a campaign speech by President George H.W. Bush. The issue remained relatively bipartisan until the late 1990s, when energy industry lobbyists used propaganda to convince so-called “pro-business” Republicans that the idea was based on shaky science. The partisan divide has persisted since then (right along with warming temperatures), but Republicans are finally beginning to come around, which is a nice way of saying that some of them are starting to think about accepting — and addressing — the reality of the global crisis that’s been unfolding for decades. Among them: A handful of GOP lawmakers in New Hampshire, who are incorporating climate change into their campaign platforms ahead of the November election, the New Hampshire Bulletin reported. |
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