As a result, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) “did not have a comprehensive understanding of the extent of the management and operational issues at Jackson’s system” said a report from the EPA’s Inspector General (IG), an internal watchdog.
The report said that the state’s “oversight failures obscured Jackson’s long-standing challenges, allowed issues to compound over time, and contributed to the system’s eventual failure.”
The report also found that Mississippi failed to report two Safe Drinking Water Act violations in 2016 and 2017 in a timely manner and took no formal enforcement actions for more than four years beginning in September 2018. As a result, the city had no violations listed from 2012 to 2017 and could not be flagged as an enforcement priority for the EPA.
The report also found that on one occasion, in July 2015, samples collected by the state showed lead levels past the threshold at which action must be taken, but the state took several months to notify Jackson.
The city’s water issues boiled over in August 2022 after flooding of the Pearl River knocked the city’s biggest water treatment plant out of commission, leaving some residents without clean water for months.
Read more in a full report at TheHill.com.
