This Water Crisis Could Last 10 Years: Many Fleeing City Amidst 'Hopelessness', But 1 Group is Fighting It
Hundreds of thousands of Americans don’t even have clean drinking water.
The problem is taking a serious toll on one Mississippi community — so much that the city’s residents are fleeing for other towns and cities.
Jackson, Mississippi has lost 10 percent of its residents in the last decade alone, in great part due to faulty water infrastructure, according to WTXF-TV.
Weak, aging water pipes have left residents of the state capital with inconsistent water service.
Jackson residents have struggled for generations with water outages, including one that developed over Christmas, according to Mississippi Today.
In an interview with Fox News Monday, Fred Womack of Operation Good discussed his organization’s work to help the citizens of Jackson amid a problem many wouldn’t expect to exist in the United States
“We have an infrastructure problem where we have a crumbling pipe system, and our water treatment plant here went down,” Womack described.
“With the rebuilding stage, it causes pressure on some of the weaker pipes, and [we’re] continuing to have water breakages in the city.”
“So it’s putting a lot of strain on the already impoverished citizens of Jackson.”
Operation Good is a community charity with the mission of improving Jackson’s quality of life.
One of the group’s missions entails providing emergency assistance to locals affected by the city’s water outages, according to a GoFundMe fundraiser.
Just had a powerful interview with Tim Finch of Operation Good. Here’s a clip of Finch and the organization’s youth participants of putting out water to distribute to a new crowd of Jacksonians in South Jackson #jxnwatercrisis pic.twitter.com/YHDdq9GPDx
— Aallyah Wright (uh-LEE-yah) (@aallyahpatrice) September 1, 2022
Womack says the city’s economy fuels other chronic problems blighting Jackson.
“We have a very bad economic problem that leads to violence, and it leads to hopelessness among the population.”
The city has also lost 6,000 businesses since 1990, according to Fox.
Jackson had the highest homicide rate in the United States in 2022, according to WLBT-TV.
There’s no immediate solution on the horizon for Jackson’s water crisis.
Hinds County Administrator Kenneth Wayne Jones is warning residents to expect water outages over the next ten years as the water system is gradually replaced, according to Fox News.
Jackson isn’t the only city afflicted with a faulty water system. Others include Flint, Michigan; Houston, Texas, and Baltimore, Maryland.
A water main breaks every two minutes nationwide, according to a report from the American Society of Civil Engineers.
The same group has given the United States a grade of C minus for its infrastructure.
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