Jackson’s Water Crisis
In August 2022 two of my friends and I had just settled into
our new apartment on Seneca Avenue in the Fondren Neighborhood in North
Jackson. Within a week, we noticed constantly flowing fire hydrants and
wondered what was going on. Within a few days, the announcement came that we
should boil water. A couple days later, the water stopped entirely as a storm
had overloaded the city's water system, causing a total shutdown and lots of
pressure. We were told the next day that we were going to be moving to online
classes until the problem was resolved. I knew someone about the problems with
the aging water system, but not nearly to the extent that I now know about
after viewing the mini-documentary about the issues in a seminar on community
planning. Jackson, Mississippi is planned poorly and almost every way, it’s
hyper spread and in order to do any two things on an outing, you need to drive
there, and between anything that you do. There is almost no pedestrian,
infrastructure, and zoning doesn’t allow for many extensive areas of beauty.
These are only the things you can see. Jackson is clearly also poorly planned
in regards to what’s going on underneath the city. The aging pipes and
underpowered water treatment system cause frequent rolling, boil water notice,
and after seeing what I saw in the documentary, the boil water notice, was only
when it was purely toxic, but I honestly feel disgusting, knowing I drank and
showered in that water when it was supposedly fine.
One thing that the documentary did not get into is the dark
root of the problem of Jackson’s failure of planning, vehicular, dependent,
sprawl, and underpowered water systems, that cent service the whole area.
Jackson’s population has been declining rapidly since the 1960s. This is due
directly to deep-seated racism and a white flight movement after the civil
rights movement. People kept moving farther and farther out from the city, and
the city of Jackson decided that instead of trying to address this problem,
they would continue buying land where the people were moving to keep them
within their municipal bonds. this has led to Jackson’s issue of having a huge
landmass to police, and run utilities to, but as more and more people move out
of the downtown core, it doesn’t have any of the tax dollars to keep the
systems up. This means there’s really no way to overhaul any infrastructure to
create any sort of community or pedestrian experience and any time that storms
happen, water crises will continue to happen. This is a spiral of diminishing
returns. Something needs to be figured out soon in order to plan the future of
Jackson, or there will be a point of no saving it if we haven’t already reached
that point.
Again, the documentary seen in class was eye-opening, a link will be provided below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPwQ5mygJ-8
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