The search is on for the City of Jackson to fill their public works director position after Khalid Woods resigned for a second time since July.
Regulators and public-works officials agree that Jackson’s water-treatment facilities have completed key improvements ahead of a looming Environmental Protection Agency deadline, but much work remains to bring the capital city’s system into compliance with public health regulations.
Beginning on May 18, Mercadel lost access to water for three days, had low pressure for two weeks and unsafe drinking water for over a month at his Maddox Road home. It was a miserable continuation of the Jackson water crisis not much easier to endure than the city-wide outages of February and March.
The City of Jackson has completed repairs on the Siwell Road Well in south Jackson, the first of two wells in the Jackson Maddox Well System to receive a full replacement after mid-May failures left thousands in the Jackson metropolitan area with low water pressure, potentially unsafe for consumption.
The Mississippi Free Press met with Public Works Director Dr. Charles Williams on May 3 to discuss the EPA’s 2020 emergency order, the ongoing effort to improve the city’s water treatment plants, the documentation of the city’s water treatment violations, and transparency over water quality and safety.
Jackson residents have safe water again this week, after the city announced today that it was lifting the boil-water notice put in place after a control-panel fire at O.B. Curtis Water Treatment Plant.
Jackson residents are without clean water yet again, as an early-morning electrical fire at the O.B. Curtis Water Treatment Plant depressurized the city’s transmission system just ahead of the weekend.
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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