Assessing Public Experiences during System-Level Water Service Failures: The Case of Jackson, Mississippi

Failures in urban water systems are a common occurrence due to disasters, aging infrastructure, and financial constraints, among other concerns. This trend is displayed in the 2022 Jackson Water Crisis (JWC), a system-wide outage that caused Jackson, Mississippi’s 150,000 residents (of which 82.5% are African-American) to lose water access. Such failure is linked to a lack of maintenance and capital investment in Jackson’s water system, something inhibited by workforce and financial constraints. This trend is not unique to Jackson—many water systems throughout the US are falling into disrepair (e.g., Flint, Michigan), especially in shrinking cities with a declining customer base and revenues. Knowing that similar water outages will happen in the future, it is imperative to capture how water outages impact end-users. Here, we seek to document the experiences of community members and bring awareness to equity issues within water infrastructure, which can spur policy change. Specifically, our research objective is to understand end-users experiences during the JWC and to align these perceptions with water quality data from the Drinking Water Watch. We perform a qualitative analysis of news media data from the crisis and statistically analyze Drinking Water Watch water quality data. We expect our analysis to reveal the cascading impacts of water outages on public health, safety, and quality of life. For example, low-income communities struggled to access bottled water distribution sites due to limited transportation alternatives. Our results will inform future responses to similar crises in Jackson and other communities, ensuring end-users’ perspectives are incorporated.