Mississippi crisis highlights climate threat to drinking water nationwide
Flash floods, wildfires and hurricanes are easy to recognize as ravages of a fast-changing climate. But now climate change has also emerged as a growing threat to clean, safe drinking water across the country.
The deluge that knocked out a fraying water plant this week in Jackson, Miss., depriving more than 150,000 people of drinking water, offered the latest example of how quickly America’s aging treatment plants and decades-old pipes can crumple under the shocks of a warming world.
“There’s a crisis at hand,” said Mikhail Chester, a professor of civil, environmental and sustainable engineering at Arizona State University. “The climate is simply changing too fast relative to how quickly we could change our infrastructure.”
Earlier this summer, more than 25,000 people lost their water, some for weeks, after deadly floods ripped through eastern Kentucky, breaking water lines as they obliterated entire neighborhoods.
Utility companies across Texas spent the summer coping with hundreds of water-main breaks as record heat baked and shifted the drought-stricken soil surrounding pipes. This came after a bitter winter storm that plunged Texas into freezing darkness in February 2021 and caused thousands of pipes to burst.
And from the Gulf Coast to the East Coast, supercharged hurricanes like Harvey and Ida now regularly debilitate water suppliers, forcing hundreds of thousands of people to boil their water or scramble for bottles days or weeks after the storms pass.
This is on top of the slower-moving threats such as rising sea levels that can contaminate water supplies with saltwater, or a Western “megadrought” that is withering reservoirs and parching the Colorado River that supplies water to some 40 million people.
President Joe Biden made Jackson’s chronic water problems a centerpiece argument for the sprawling infrastructure bill he signed into law last fall. Money has only recently begun flowing to states and cities from that law, though, and Jackson’s share has been nowhere near the $1 billion or more that city officials said is necessary to replace their system.
The infrastructure law pledged some $50 billion for climate resilience — a lifeline for communities whose water systems were threatened by climate shocks. The money amounts to a political wager by Democrats that government spending can address decades of underinvestment and neglect that has fallen disproportionately on poor, minority-populated places like Jackson.
But the new law also reveals what experts describe as a weakness in how the federal government allocates such money. To be considered for grants, a city must be able to pay for specialized staff members who can assemble a competitive application. This poses a challenge for many smaller, poorer cities, which are often further at the mercy of state officials who decide which applications are sent up the chain.
In the past two years, Jackson has not applied for either of two federal climate-resilience programs that got big boosts in the infrastructure bill, according to data from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
It was not clear whether Jackson had decided not to apply or had sought to apply but was blocked by state officials. A spokesperson for the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency, which determines which applications get submitted for some federal grants, would not say whether Jackson had sought to apply for those grants, saying it required a formal public records request.
Karine Jean-pierre, the White House press secretary, said Wednesday that the state of Mississippi received $75 million to upgrade drinking water systems across the state, with an additional $429 million coming available over the next five years. But that money is in the hands of the state Legislature, not Jackson officials. The city has used more than $20 million from Biden’s 2021 economic aid bill, the American Rescue Plan, to deal with water and sewer needs, she said. She also said there was nearly $31 million available for the city to improve its water system through revolving loan funds of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Biden called Jackson’s mayor, Chokwe Antar Lumumba, on Wednesday to discuss the situation. A White House press aide told reporters that Biden “expressed his determination to provide federal support to address the immediate crisis and the longer-term effort to rebuild Jackson’s water infrastructure.”
The fragility of the city’s water system has been a problem in Jackson for decades. But the recent flood introduced a complication the city had never wrestled with before, as pumps were overwhelmed by the surge of water.