Jackson, Mississippi residents are now without safe drinking water after flooding last week. It has been years since infrastructural neglect.
“We’re always on alert, and we’re always in the community,” said Efren Nuñez, an organizer with the Jackson-based Immigrant Alliance for Justice & Equalitydistributing water donations to the city. “They call us right away when there’s an emergency.”
The Immigrant Alliance for Justice & Equality was founded after the largest single-state immigration enforcement actionIn 2019, nearly 700 undocumented Mississippi workers were detained. This was the largest American history event. The group provides vital immigration, labor and health services to the predominantly Black city’s small Latino immigrant community.
But organizers are now focusing primarily on getting water to the community members. Many of these people have struggled to find support and information in Spanish about the crisis.
“They’re not doing well, because there’s no water anywhere,” said Nuñez, who also noted that residents are still struggling with the impact of extreme flooding on their own homes. “They don’t have water to boil or cook, or bathe. We currently have only enough water for drinking. And, the schools are closed, so they’re also struggling to get to work.”
But organizers say that the sudden emergency in Jackson has been developing for years, if it not decades.
Officials and residents had long been aware of the issues and disruptions plaguing the city’s water treatment facilities, which include chronically low water pressure and dangerous levels of pollution. Yet, officials have been slow to make the necessary fixes in Jackson, which led to an acute crisis after major flooding last weekend disabled the city’s main water plant.
Advocates in the city have largely attributed the slow response to longstanding racial injustice and environmental racism, citing the fact that Jackson is over 82 percent Black — the result of decades of white flight that drove out white residents, and deeply harmed the city’s infrastructure. Nuñez also noted that the crisis has been amplified by political conflicts between the Democrat-led city, and the state’s Republican Gov. Tate Reeves.
As residents struggle to deal with the crisis, other local grassroots groups have also started distributing water as part a temporary mutual aid effort. The Mississippi Rapid Response Coalition is made up of more than 30 organizations from the state. distributing bottled waterEveryday in affected areas
“It’s been chaos,” Sarah Stripp, managing director of the Jackson-based nonprofit Springboard to Opportunities, told the Washington Post. “There has been varying water pressure depending on where folks are in the city. It’s gone up and down in all the communities we work in. There’s been times it runs clear, times it runs brown.”
As for Nuñez, who lives in Jackson himself, there’s still access to water in his home. He attributes his luck to his neighborhood’s proximity to Jackson’s wealthier and whiter suburbs, whose water supplies have not been affected by the crisis.
“They had a similar situation where their treatment plants broke down, but they fixed it right away,” he said of the suburban water supply. “That’s the thing — they had the money. Jackson doesn’t have that.”
