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Category: In-Depth

Overhead view of OB Curtis Water Plant
In-Depth

Under The Surface, Part 2: After Jackson Freeze, the Fog of War

It was Wednesday, Feb. 17, 2021, when it all went wrong at the O.B. Curtis Water Treatment Plant. Dr. Charles Williams, public works director for the City of Jackson, could see the writing on the wall. “We started losing system pressure. Everything bottomed out. We had to figure out why,” he says now. A war, of sorts, lay ahead.

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Governor Tate Reeves speaks while Dr. Thomas Dobbs listens
In-Depth

Pandemic Timeline: COVID-19 in Mississippi

The COVID-19 pandemic upended our lives and presented new challenges to leaders around the world in 2020. Using this timeline tool, you can explore how the worst public-health crisis in a century unfolded in Mississippi, examine how state, local and public-health leaders responded, and retrace the spread of the novel coronavirus alongside the various policies they enacted.

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Major Robert Lyle passing out food to the homeless
In-Depth

A Shower, Then a Hotel: Service on the Critical Front Line of Solving Homelessness

Realtor and Flowood resident Teresa Renkenberger founded Shower Power and has been courting homeless Mississippians since 2019, offering free showers and hot tea to them once a week. But, when the temperature began to drop in Jackson first in January and then a major freeze hit in February, she was full of concern that some of the people she has developed relationships with might die out there in the cold from hypothermia. 

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Tamiko Smith sitting with dialysis bag
In-Depth

Under the Surface, Part 1: Jackson Residents Struggle from Neglected Water System

What does it mean to be without water? It is innumerable small humiliations: the splash of a toilet flushed with a bucket, days on end without a shower, no clean clothes. It is weeks without a cooked meal, a sink full of unclean dishes, brushing one’s teeth with water from a bottle, if a bottle can be found. For Tamiko and Otis Smith and many others, it is something far more dangerous. 

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A white doghouse with the Mississippi Critterz name painted on it sits outside the shelter
In-Depth

Grim Discoveries: How Workers at Oxford Animal Shelter Exposed Neglect, Abuse

Former employees of an Oxford animal shelter accused operators and co-workers of animal abuse and neglect, leading to an emergency meeting and its temporary closure last week.The shelter in question, Mississippi Critterz, is a nonprofit organization contracting with the city of Oxford and Lafayette County. On Monday, March 8, Oxford Alderman Janice Antonow, who is the city liaison with the shelter, announced that it will be temporarily closed.

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