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.
The Mississippi Lottery Corporation raised $80 million for state highways and almost $59 million to support public education during its first full fiscal year. The education funds will go to the state’s Education Enhancement Fund, which supports the Early Childhood Learning Collaborative, which is a state-funded pre-K program, and the Classroom Supply Fund.
The Gulf of Mexico and southeast Atlantic coasts experienced record-breaking numbers of high-tide flooding days in 2020. The city of Bay St. Louis, Miss., jumped from three days of high-tide flooding in 2000 to 22 days in 2020.
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.
Mississippi will raise more than $50 million for K-12 schools, colleges and universities by the end of its first full fiscal year on June 30. The education funding comes on top of $80 million that the lottery already raised this year for roads and bridges.
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.
Mississippi is not facing a severe shortage of gasoline this week, and state leadership have unanimously called for calm and an end to panic buying after a cyberattack on the Colonial Pipeline that straddles the southeastern portion of the U.S.
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.
The reaction to integration, which included white Jackson families immediately pulling 5,000 of their children out of local schools, was but one piece of the water-infrastructure puzzle. Another came in 1972, an unintended consequence of necessary environmental reform. That year, the Water Pollution Control Act steamrolled through a veto from President Richard Nixon. Few took notice.
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