500,000 U.S. homes had water cut off

OKLAHOMA CITY — Water service was cut off to an estimated

1.4 million people living in more than a half-a-million American households that got behind on their bills two years ago, as some struggled to keep up with rising costs and governments didn’t do enough to help, a group contends in a first-ofits-kind study released Wednesday.

Food & Water Watch, a Washington-based nonprofit that advocates for affordable and safe food and water for everyone, made public requests for 2016 residential shut-off records from the two biggest water suppliers in each state and received the information from 73 of them.

It found that among the cities with the highest rates, where at least 10 percent of residential customers had their water shut off for some period of time, were Detroit, New Orleans, Springdale, Arkansas, and Oklahoma’s two largest cities, Oklahoma City and Tulsa.

Poor people and cities with large minority populations frequently had higher shut-off rates, the study found. The author of the report,

Mary Grant, noted that some poor households in New Orleans and Detroit that year paid more than $1,000 for water service, which amounted to about 9 percent of their household incomes.

“Nine percent of your income just for your basic water service. That’s, by any measure, unaffordable,”

Grant said.

Jaime Moten, 41, of Oklahoma City, said her water was shut off for three days in 2016 after she lost her job as a grocery store manager. Relatives provided water that she and her children used to drink and brush their teeth, and the Salvation Army paid the $202 needed to turn her water back on.

Oklahoma City was listed as No. 1 for cutoff rates in the report, with about 23 percent of customers losing water in 2016.