A Citywide Water Emergency Order from Selma, La., Depressed by the Breakdown of Broken Pipes and Emergency Power Suspensions
Water expands when it freezes, bursting pipes that aren’t protected. When the temperature rises, the broken pipes begin leaking many thousands of gallons of water.
Dozens of water systems either had boil advisories in place because of low pressure or warned of bigger catastrophes if leaks from broken pipes weren’t found and water shut off.
Some residents in Shreveport, La. had no water on Monday. The mayor of Selma declared a state of emergency because the city was worried about running out of water. Workers at a food bank in Greenville, S.C., opened their doors to a rush of water and were trying to save $1 million in food. Police departments in Atlanta said their emergency systems were overwhelmed by calls about broken pipes.
And over a holiday weekend, when many businesses are closed, those leaks can go undetected for days, Charleston, S.C., water system spokesman Mike Saia told WCSC-TV.
Crews in the city of 18,000 were able to find and fix enough leaks to equalize the amount of water coming into and out of the system, Perkins said Monday in a statement. But there was a major leak that hasn’t yet been found and two more nights that are forecast to be below freezing, the mayor said.
We are still trying to return pressure to the water system. Despite the efforts at the plants, the pressure is not increasing despite the fact that we are producing significant amounts of water. The issue has to be significant leaks in the system that we have yet to identify,” Jackson officials said in a statement.
An emergency order was given by the Mayor James Perkins Jr. in Selma on Christmas Day asking business owners to check for leaks before the water runs out.
Problems at individual buildings can be caused by broken pipes. WFSA-TV reported that there was a huge leak in the Alabama Statehouse on Christmas Eve.
The water cut power to the food bank’s freezers and refrigerators, and workers faced the double challenge of getting power restored before the food spoiled and keeping water out of the area. Up to $1 million of food could be destroyed, the food bank said.
Water Problems — Jackson, Mississippi Explanation: Another Grim Report from Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba
The forecast did provide good news. Monday’s highs across the Deep South were expected to be at least in the 40s and the freezing temperatures at night shouldn’t last as long until a much warmup arrives later this week.
When Jackson, Miss., Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba appeared before cameras and microphones earlier this week, he was there to deliver another grim report on the city’s troubled water system, which officials have been struggling for months to patch while they plan for a more permanent fix.
A new boil-water notice was issued because of more burst pipes caused by the winter storm that hit the country last week.
Resident Halima is familiar with those challenges. It was low pressure, caused by the water flowing from the faucet. On the day after Christmas, I didn’t have water.
The People’s Advocacy Institute is helping to distribute bottled water, and it is led by a lifelong Jackson resident named Olufemi. She says the latest issues with the tap water have been mostly an annoyance.
City residents have been without water or with no water pressure so frequently, she says, “I was like, oh, here we go again. We’re used to it.
This time, the problem is different, says Brian Smith, the Environmental Protection Agency’s Safe Drinking Water Branch chief for Region 4, which covers Mississippi.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/31/1145966097/water-problems-jackson-mississippi-explanation
The State of the Water Infrastructure Problem: Evidence from Jackson, Mississippi, EPA Against the President Biden-Biden Infrastructure Measures
According to Dennis Truax, a civil and environmental engineer at Mississippi State University, that distribution system experienced 10 water line breaks per mile per year four years ago. Water Main breaks in the US were found to vary from 11 to 14 per 100 miles.
“Even if the water treatment plant worked perfectly, the distribution system is in such poor condition that the water is likely not safe to drink reliably,” Truax says.
The EPA filed a complaint against the city for failing to provide water that was reliably met with Safe Drinking Water Act standards. Jackson has been consistently in violation of those standards since at least 2018, according to Mississippi Today.
The move is supposed to be an interim step until the sides can negotiate a judicially enforceable consent decree. As Mississippi Today notes, however, there are already consent decrees in place that go back to at least 2013. They’ve failed to fix the problems.
That has contributed to what Erik Olson, the senior strategic director for health and food at the Natural Resources Defense Council, has said is “decades of disinvestment in the city’s water infrastructure.”
Until about the 1980s, the federal government covered 60% to 70% of funding for water infrastructure, with the remainder split between state and local governments, says Mae Stevens, a water policy expert with Banner Public Affairs.
The local funding comes mostly from payments from individual users, which is a problem in Jackson, where 1 in 4 residents live in poverty and many struggle to pay their water bills.
To be sure, the city of Jackson has had its share of funding issues. The new meters the city signed weren’t working as they should. Tens of thousands of customers never received a bill, resulting in millions of dollars in lost revenue.
The lack of money means that Jackson has a series of emergency fixes rather than a rational program of maintenance.
Stevens says the Infrastructure Bill signed into law by President Biden in January of this year has made a noticeable difference in the spending of water infrastructure over the next five years.
She says that the US has been chronically underfunding water infrastructure for the last 40 years. There isn’t preventative maintenance because there hasn’t been money, and now you’re seeing crises because more and more bills are coming due.