Shower with your mouth shut, people in Mississippi told

RESIDENTS of Jackson, Mississippi, have been told to shower with their mouths closed because the water in the city is not safe.

Some 180,000 people have lacked clean running water for nearly a week after an ageing treatment plant was knocked offline by flooding last Monday night – highlighting the fragility of America’s crumbling infrastructure.

Now, when residents in Jackson turn on the tap, undrinkable brown water sputters out, often under very low pressure. Water samples collected on July 28 showed “turbidity [cloudiness] levels of 1 to 2.5 units”, compared with standard levels of 0.3. This means there is an “increased chance the water may contain disease-causing organisms”.

As such, residents in the city – where 80 per cent of the population is black and 25 per cent live in poverty – have been ordered to boil water before drinking it, cooking with it, washing dishes or brushing teeth.

The latest order says people can “wash hands and bathe as usual – as long as no water is swallowed”.

The struggle has been likened to that of residents in Flint, Michigan, whose water supply was contaminated by lead in 2016, exposing tens of thousands of people to dangerous chemicals and sparked an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease which killed 12 people.