A federal watchdog report Monday laid blame on the Mississippi State Department of Health, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency, for prolonging Jackson’s well-documented water woes, saying their failed oversight contributed to the capital city’s infrastructure issues lasting as long as they have.
“The MSDH’s inaction prolonged Jackson’s noncompliance,” the EPA Office of Inspector General’s report reads. The EPA OIG is an independent office within the EPA that conducts investigations and audits on behalf of the agency.
The report goes on to say that the state not documenting or raising attention to critical issues within the water system “obscured the long-standing challenges of the system, allowed issues to compound over time, and contributed to the system’s failure.”
As of Tuesday afternoon, MSDH hadn’t released a statement on the report, only telling Mississippi Today that it was still reviewing the document.
Among the many faults the report identified, the EPA OIG found that MSDH hasn’t had a proper enforcement procedure for drinking water systems since the EPA granted the state primacy — or the authority to regulate those systems — in 1977. The report criticizes both MSDH for not having enforcement procedures, as well as the EPA for not requiring MSDH to do so.
The investigation claims that MSDH didn’t call enough attention to significant issues with Jackson’s water system, and that by not doing so it left the EPA in the dark.
“Because the MSDH did not consistently identify significant deficiencies in Jackson’s sanitary surveys, there were no subsequent violations of which the EPA would have been made aware,” the EPA OIG wrote.
Specifically, the document says: “System staffing was a common concern noted throughout multiple sanitary surveys but only rose to the level of a significant deficiency in the February 2020 sanitary survey. In addition, membrane trains, which provide filtration, failed integrity testing in multiple sanitary surveys from 2015 through 2017 but were not deemed a significant deficiency until the February 2020 sanitary survey.”
Notably, only half of the membrane trains at the O.B. Curtis water treatment plant were running when a 2021 winter storm shut down Jackson’s water distribution.
The EPA OIG also listed several instances when MSDH failed to timely communicate with Jackson over its system deficiencies, including when the city failed a lead test in July 2015. MSDH didn’t notify the city of the test results until January 2016, and, due to the delay, “for approximately six months, Jackson residents were unaware that lead may have been in their drinking water,” the report says.
“For the majority of the sanitary surveys and inspections from 2016 through 2020, the MSDH had inconsistent communication with Jackson,” the report adds. “Either the MSDH sent written notification of significant deficiencies several months after conducting a sanitary survey or inspection, or it did not notify Jackson.”
Federal law requires states to conduct “sanitary surveys” at least once every three years to make sure public water systems are up to code.
Not only did MSDH delay telling Jackson about the city’s deficiencies, the report says, the agency also didn’t adequately reflect the severity of the city’s issues in its inspections. In an interview, an EPA Region IV employee told the EPA OIG that a 2020 diagnosis of Jackson’s water system found issues dating back to 2014 that MSDH hadn’t listed as “significant discrepancies.”
“According to a (Region IV enforcement) employee, the MSDH may have been aware of more problems than what was documented in the sanitary surveys,” the EPA OIG adds. “That employee speculated that there was a lack of ‘political will’ in the MSDH to address problems identified.”
Noting the city’s above-average number of line breaks — which were over three times the industry average from 2017 to 2021 — the report says that while line breaks are usually not reported to the EPA, the state could report the issue to the EPA if they find an “exorbitant number” of boil water notices. From 2014 to 2022, Jackson issued approximately 1,570 boil water notices. The report emphasizes the issue with a photo of a coffee mug captioned “Welcome to Boil Water Alert Mississippi.”
The report is the third this year that the EPA Office of Inspector General, an independent watchdog agency, released about Jackson’s water system. All three stem from the near-collapse of the system in 2022, which happened after the coincidence of flooding on the Pearl River and the failure of pumps at the city’s main treatment plant. Since then, the Department of Justice, EPA and city officials came to an agreement to allow a court-appointed third-party manager to temporarily takeover the water system.
The first report, released in May, found that MSDH and the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality didn’t racially discriminate against Jackson in funding the city’s water system.
About a week later, though, the EPA OIG released another report that found that MSDH failed to provide Jackson with flexible loan options that are available for economically disadvantaged cities. That report also described failures on the city level, including poor management of its treatment plants as well as gaps in communication between operators and higher-ups.
Monday’s report lists several recommended actions to prevent the agencies’ short-comings in the future, including assessing MSDH’s sanitary survey program and how it helps water systems overcome deficiencies. Another action it lists is to make sure that MSDH has a procedure for enforcing federal and state drinking water laws.
“If (MSDH) is not implementing enforcement procedures as required by Safe Drinking Water Act section 1413, consider whether procedures for rescinding state primacy for water systems should be initiated,” the recommended action states.
In an e-mailed statement from EPA Press Officer Terry Johnson, the agency said that it has “previously identified many of the same concerns raised by the (EPA OIG) and has already begun implementing actions to address their recommendations. This includes working with (MSDH) to ensure strong drinking water regulatory oversight at the state and federal levels.” The City of Jackson did not respond to a request for comment by this story’s publication.
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