Mississippi Mayor Jackson said he hopes water service will be restored this week

Cassandra Werklin, a mother of three, told CNN her children can’t go to school and have to buy water for cooking, brushing teeth and other basic necessities. Told.

Welchlin, executive director of the Mississippi Black Women’s Roundtable, said brown water was running from her faucet.

“We don’t use that water yet. We don’t boil it and do anything with it because it has sand in it,” she said. “This is a really bad public safety issue.”

According to the White House, President Joe Biden, who on Tuesday signed a major disaster declaration to begin aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, met with Lumumba on Wednesday to discuss tackling the emergency.

Residents and businesses still face many challenges.

At the water distribution event held at Hawkins Field Airport on Tuesday, residents waited in lines for more than a mile. In just two hours, 700 cases of water were gone, and some were turned down.

Some stores were running out of supplies. Jackson resident Geraldine Watts was able to hook up some of the last water bottle cases at the grocery store on Monday, she told CNN. , I use bottled or boiled tap water for everything.

“We keep saying we’re going to be the next Michigan,” Watts said.

At Jackson State University, water is being delivered to students with “low or no water pressure at all campus locations,” officials said. He said the football program was in “crisis mode”.

The water system has been plagued by “more than 30 years of deferred maintenance” and the city will need financial help to catch up, Lumumba said earlier this week.

What happened, what the authorities say is being done

The governor said Friday he was told it was “almost certain that Jackson would be unable to produce running water in the coming weeks or months unless something significantly improved.”

OB Curtis received additional water from the reservoir due to flooding. This has changed the way the power plant’s water is treated, causing it to produce even less than before and significantly reducing water pressure in the city, Lumumba said Monday.

Some improvements have been made at the factory, but more are needed, state officials said Tuesday night.

On Tuesday, the plant was pumping about 30 million gallons a day. Jim Craig, director of health protection for the state health department, told reporters on Tuesday that it’s estimated to pump about 50 million gallons a day.

Officials hope to “install additional rental pumps capable of pumping at least 4 million gallons” into the system, possibly by Wednesday, the governor said Tuesday.

“It’s progress and it’s going to help,” Reeves said.

“I’ve said many times it doesn’t matter if our systems fail, it’s just a matter of when our systems fail,” the mayor said Tuesday, adding that the city is “working on its own.” “For most of the two years with regard to the water crisis.”

Lumumba told CNN the city is working on more water events.

Starting Thursday, seven mega water distribution sites with 36 truckloads of water each day will be open to the public, said Lt. Col. Stephen McCraney, director of the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency.

Businesses and volunteer groups such as Anheuser-Busch, Walmart and Save-A-Lot also donate water to the city, McRaney added.

The city also provides wash water, Jackson City Councilman Aaron Banks told CNN.

“One of the first things we noticed is that people need to be able to flush because as long as they have the quality of life they need, it matters.

“At the end of the day, a fix is ​​needed, and the same attention that was given to Jackson as Flint, Michigan,” Banks said.

Twenty-year-old Mace Brown, a junior at Jackson State University, organized a group of about 20 students called the Mississippi Student Water Crisis Advocacy Team. The group launched a social media campaign on Tuesday to raise funds and promote the hotline.

As of Wednesday morning, the group had raised about $2,000 and had about a dozen calls for help.

“We were asked for help by residents with disabilities,” Brown said. “I also got calls from out-of-town people asking me to help them with their aging parents.”

The group plans to knock on doors in hopes of reaching people who may not have seen the social media campaign, Brown said.

Longstanding Problems in Problematic Water Systems

“It’s been very frustrating because there hasn’t been a month since then when a particular area south of Jackson hasn’t experienced zero to low water flow,” City Councilman Banks told CNN.