In the summer of 2015, officials in Jackson, Mississippi, sent the state a series of water samples taken from various locations in the city’s public water system. Residents had been complaining for weeks about low pressure in their faucets, and the city wanted to test the distribution system for possible contaminants. In fact, regulators at the Mississippi Department of Health (MSDH) found elevated lead levels in the water supply. But instead of immediately informing the city of the health risk, they withheld the data for six months. Inadvertently, residents continued to drink toxic water.

Environmental Protection Agency officials were unaware of the problem until they inspected the city’s water system in February and March 2020. In Jackson, they discovered a network of pipes plagued by leaks, poor corrosion control, and elevated lead levels. These “persistent and concerning violations” prompted the EPA to issue an emergency order requiring the city to make improvements. As events in the years that followed would show, it was already too late: The following winter, a system-wide outage occurred in Jackson during a storm, leaving several neighborhoods without water for weeks. Then, in August 2022, the city’s main water treatment plant failed due to severe flooding, sparking a spectacular health crisis that captured the attention of the entire nation. To this day, some residents feel they cannot rely on the system to provide them with clean drinking water.

For years, none of the parties with some authority over Jackson’s water supply has taken full responsibility for the water crisis. State government has long accused city officials of mismanaging the system and violating the Safe Drinking Water Act. City officials blame the state for rejecting their repeated requests for funds to improve the crumbling infrastructure. The EPA also has a role to play. In May, a report from the Project for Government Oversight found that EPA regulators had turned a blind eye for years as Mississippi diverted federal money from Jackson. Now a new report from the EPA’s Office of Inspector General, an independent division within the agency, puts the Mississippi Department of Health in hot water.

The MSDH’s failure to promptly report the results of lead testing in Jackson in 2015 is just one example of the communication deficiencies that kept local and state officials in the dark about the dire state of the city’s water system, the report said. Beyond that single incident, the inspector general reported that MSDH officials repeatedly failed to document financial and technical capacity issues, address systemic deficiencies such as excessive main breaks and boil water advisories, or notify the city about any of the problems they identified. These practices “obscured the system’s long-standing problems, allowed problems to grow larger over time, and contributed to the system’s failure,” the report said.

Dominic DeLeo, a local clean water activist and longtime Jackson resident, told Grist it’s not fair to blame city officials for problems they don’t fully understand. Over the past half-century, Jackson has endured a long period of decline that was the result of deindustrialization and white flight, which deprived city government of the resources to maintain the city’s aging infrastructure. Last year, Mississippi’s Clarion Ledger newspaper reported that Jackson was the fastest-shrinking city in the country. City officials appear to have some information about why Jackson’s water system was failing. In the years leading up to the water crisis, the city’s Public Works Department had raised alarms about persistent budget deficits and staff shortages making it impossible to address water system problems.

In 2016, the Jackson City Council declined to declare a state of emergency to address ongoing water problems, so as not to alarm the community. “We don’t want the people of the city or our customers to worry that there’s something wrong with the water supply,” said then-Mayor Tony Yarber. At a hearing in 2021, city Public Works Director Bob Miller said, “There’s no other way to say it, but we’re holding on with all our might.” What Jackson lacked was a lack of money to do something with the information they had.

Despite the dire conditions in Jackson, the state failed to direct funds from the state’s drinking water fund to the city to diagnose and fix its water problems. Had the EPA been notified of the problems in Jackson earlier, the agency could have taken proactive steps, such as providing greater oversight of the MSDH or ensuring that federal emergency funds got to Jackson more quickly, to prevent the kind of system-wide outages that rocked Jackson in subsequent years. One of the issues that state regulators omitted from their annual reports were the constant boil water advisories that Jackson residents had to contend with in the years leading up to the crisis. The city issued these advisories when pressure in residents’ faucets dropped due to leaks throughout the water system. On average, distribution networks should see no more than 15 main breaks per 100 miles of pipe per year, the OIG said. In Jackson, there were an average of 55 pipe breaks per 100 miles between 2017 and 2021.

The report’s findings vindicate Jackson residents who have long felt abandoned by the state.

“I wish the report had surprised us, but people’s trust in the state is so low,” said Makani Themba, a local activist. “The governor attacks us whenever he gets a chance. It was just hostile.”

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A pot of unspent federal funds could have prevented Jackson’s water crisis

After the EPA charged Jackson officials with violating the Safe Drinking Water Act in January 2022, a federal judge stripped the city of its authority to manage its own water system. Ted Henifin, an engineer by training, was put in charge of overseeing the system until conditions in Jackson improved. Last year, the Biden administration secured an unprecedented $600 million in emergency funding for Jackson to repair its wastewater treatment plants and distribution network. While some residents have reported significant improvements in their water pressure over the past year, others continue to report discolored, smelly tap water. But the main problem with Henifin’s tenure, city officials told Grist, is the lack of transparency in his spending.

Henifin has full authority to decide how to distribute the federal money awarded to Jackson last year. Shortly after taking office, the engineer formed a company called JXN Water to facilitate the rehabilitation of the system, raising fears of privatization. Themba and DeLeo say many residents’ electric bills have skyrocketed since the engineer took over the system. Despite repeated requests for information about how the $600 million is being spent, the only information about the water system that local stakeholders can reliably obtain are the quarterly reports Henifin submits to the federal judge who appointed him. That lack of transparency forced a coalition of local advocacy groups to ask the EPA to file its lawsuit against the city of Jackson. That request was granted earlier this year. And yet, Themba told Grist, they still haven’t seen Henifin’s budget.

The OIG’s report includes a number of recommendations to the EPA to provide better oversight of the MSDH, including a full evaluation of the state’s process for monitoring municipal water systems and enforcing federal drinking water standards. EPA officials should also train Mississippi regulators on how to better document system deficiencies and enter that information into a federal database, the report said. The EPA agreed to all seven recommendations, according to the OIG. The MSDH has not released an official statement on the report, but told the Mississippi Free Press and ProPublica last week that it was reviewing the document.

DeLeo told Grist that the main reason things are improving in some parts of Jackson is not renewed state or federal oversight or Ted Henifin’s leadership, but the availability of funds that the low-income city desperately needs. Until Biden provided the emergency funds, Jackson had to use the state as a conduit for receiving federal grants – a dynamic that has rarely worked in the city’s favor.

“Should Jackson officials have addressed all the problems the EPA suggested to them before the water crisis,” DeLeo asked. “Yes. Did they have the means or resources to do so? No. At some point the question becomes: Who is to blame?”