South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Miss. capital city sees better water pressure as repairs continue
JACKSON, Miss. — A treatment plant at the center of water woes in Mississippi’s capital city made “significant” gains over Friday night and into Saturday, Jackson officials said.
According to a news release, the O.B. Curtis Water Plant’s total plant output increased to 86 pounds per square inch, approaching the city’s goal of 87 PSI or better.
“The outlook is very stable,” the city said in the statement. “However, additional challenges as repairs and adjustments are made do leave the potential for fluctuations in progress.”
The city said most customers should have water pressure, and only a few remaining pockets in south Jackson may still be experiencing low or no pressure.
“Work continues in the plant today on both the membrane and conventional systems. This work is initially focused on increasing the production ability of the O.B. Curtis facility,” according to the release. “Increasing the production ability will create more stability in water supply.”
Teams from Georgia and Florida rural water associations are also on site, assisting with repairing and restoring many of the automated systems that will support better management of the production of water and water quality, the city said.
Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba said at one news conference that, once pressure is restored, there are worries about the strain on aging, brittle pipes.
And even when water is running again, it’s unclear when it will be drinkable.
Recent rains, followed by flooding of the Pearl River, exacerbated long-standing problems at the O.B. Curtis treatment plant, leading to a drop in pressure throughout Jackson, where residents were already under a month-old boil-water order due to poor water quality.
The problems led to a Monday emergency declaration by Republican Gov. Tate Reeves and a disaster declaration from President Joe Biden.
The National Guard has been called to help with water distribution. The state emergency agency said close to 2.8 million bottles of water were handed out from midday Thursday to Friday afternoon.
Nonpotable water, for toilet flushing and other uses, was also being offered to people who brought their own containers to some sites.
The entire city had been without water or with low pressure at one point. Figures on how many homes and businesses had service restored were not available.
Sri Lanka politics: Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the former Sri Lankan president who was forced to flee the island nation and relinquish power after months of protests over the economy being run into the ground, returned home late Friday.
Tiran Alles, the minister for public security, confirmed Rajapaksa’s arrival in the capital, Colombo. Video footage from local news media showed the former president leaving the airport around midnight in a large motorcade.
Rajapaksa’s dramatic fall from grace this summer, just three years after a sweeping victory in presidential elections, had seemed to bring down the curtain on a powerful dynasty that ran the country of 22 million for much of the past two decades.
But his return home after
less than two months suggested that the family remained deeply entrenched. Its political party, which still holds a majority in Parliament, has been regrouping and continuing to influence the government’s affairs through an ally, Ranil Wickremesinghe, whom lawmakers elected to the presidency as his successor.
Wickremesinghe has followed a two-pronged approach as president: He has cracked down on protests and their organizers, while trying to put the economy back on track by tightening government purse strings and negotiating a bailout with the International Monetary Fund.
Turkey-Greece tensions:
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan upped his rhetoric against Greece on Saturday, threatening to “come down suddenly one night.”
Erdogan has previously used that phrase to hint at looming military operations
into Syria and Iraq against Kurdish militants that Turkey deems existential threats. He made good on that threat several times.
Speaking at a festival in Samsun, Erdogan lashed out at neighboring Greece amid political and military tensions.
Turkey has accused Greece of using Russianmade S-300 missile systems in Crete to lock onto Turkish jets in August. Ankara has also said Greek F-16s harassed Turkish jets by putting them under a radar lock during a NATO mission over the eastern Mediterranean. Turkey is submitting complaints with NATO. Athens has also accused Turkey of violating its airspace.
Somalia attack: Somali state media and residents say the extremist group al-Shabab killed at least 20 people and burned seven vehicles transporting food in the Hiran region Saturday morning, and the government’s
drought envoy called it “devastating” for communities wracked by severe drought.
Residents said the attack was in retaliation for a local mobilization against the al-Qaida-affiliated group, which holds significant parts of central and southern Somalia.
The extremist group’s presence complicates an already challenging response to the drought that has killed thousands of people. Some areas are on the brink of famine.
Russian volcano deaths:
Five people climbing Eurasia’s tallest active volcano have died in an accident and rescuers are trying to extract two other injured climbers, Russian news reports said Saturday.
The climbers were trying to ascend to the top of the Klyuchevskaya Sopka volcano, when the accident occurred about 1,600 feet below the 15,884-foot summit, the reports cited the prosecutor’s office of the
Kamchatka region as saying.
All the climbers were Russians, the reports said. Details of the accident were not immediately known.
The Kamchatka peninsula in Russia’s northeast is noted for its active and dormant volcanos.
An explosion Friday afternoon killed seven police officers heading to a social welfare event in Colombia’s southern department of Huila, according to authorities. An eighth officer was hospitalized with injuries.
Huila’s police department said on Saturday that the injured officer had hidden in the forest until police found him. Photos of the scene show a bullet-ridden truck with punctured tires, with the bodies of the men lying on the ground and in the vehicle.
Dissident groups of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, are known to have a presence in Huila.