Until the feds took over, Jackson’s water department was a huge mess. It was understaffed, regular maintenance of the system wasn’t being done, and customer water bills were not being sent or collected. The problems snowballed to the point that the shrinking capital city, even if it could find competent management, did not have the financial resources to fix the water system’s multiple deficiencies.
A federal watchdog says, however, that Jackson’s water problems were not just a failure of that city. They were also a failure of the state, most specifically the Mississippi State Department of Health. It allegedly let the situation get to the point that it took a major crisis in the form of weeks without safe drinking water, or water at all, to focus attention on how much the water system had deteriorated, and what a health threat it had become to those it was supposed to serve.
What the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Inspector General concluded should concern not just those who live in Jackson but really anywhere in this state.
The report, issued this week, said that the state Department of Health has been derelict in exercising the enforcement powers it has been given since 1977 to assure that the state’s drinking water is safe. The report also faulted the EPA for not making the Department of Health do a better job.
Although the report focuses only on the lax enforcement in Jackson, it leads one to wonder where else this might be going on.
The report said that the Department of Health’s mandatory inspections of the Jackson water system often glossed over the system’s serious problems or did not act on them in a timely manner.
“For the majority of the sanitary surveys and inspections from 2016 through 2020, the MSDH had inconsistent communication with Jackson,” the report said. “Either the MSDH sent written notification of significant deficiencies several months after conducting a sanitary survey or inspection, or it did not notify Jackson.”
It also said the Department of Health communicated poorly with the EPA, leaving the federal agency that is supposed to be the back-up for state enforcement of drinking water regulations in the dark about how bad the situation in Jackson had become — such as the exorbitant number of line breaks that prompted almost 1,600 boil water notices to be issued from 2014 to 2022.
Jackson, thanks to the federal takeover and the infusion of hundreds of millions of dollars to make repairs to its water and sewer system, is headed toward a remedy.
But before a similar crisis explodes in another Mississippi community, the state Legislature should hold hearings to determine whether the EPA’s report is accurate, and if so, demand that the leadership in the state Department of Health take corrective steps to fulfill its regulatory duties in a timely and transparent way.
Certainly, the Department of Health has a lot on its plate, but one of its most important duties is to ensure that the water that comes out of people’s taps is safe to drink. If the Department of Health cannot handle that responsibility, then Mississippi should consider asking the EPA to take over primary responsibility for enforcing the drinking water laws.
