Jackson Water Crisis: Mississippi National Guard Begins Handing Out Water as Main Facility Fails

Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves declared a state of emergency on Tuesday as Jackson's water crisis has no end in sight and has prompted the National Guard to hand out water to residents as the main facility has failed.

While residents begin to get accustomed to water challenges, the current shortage of safe running water is particularly dangerous, Reeves said. The governor, in a prepared statement, noted that the situation was very different from a boil water notice, which is also a serious situation that residents of Jackson have become tragically used to.

Jackson Water Crisis

Reeves said that until the problem is fixed, there will be no reliable running water at scale and that the city cannot produce enough water to reliably flush toilets, fight fire, and meet other "critical needs."

In a statement, Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba said that he hopes the new crisis will spur various levels of government to address the city's deteriorating water treatment infrastructure. On Tuesday, he said that the city of Jackson was grateful for the support that they were now receiving from the state, as per NBC News.

Lumumba said that for the better part of two years, Jackson has been going at it alone when it comes to the water crisis. He added that on multiple occasions, he said that it was not a matter of if the system fails, but a matter of when the system would fail.

The Mississippi Emergency Management Agency will take the leading role in providing bottled water, said Reeves. He added that replacing the largest city's infrastructure of running water with human distribution is a massively complicated logistical task.

According to CNN, Jackson's main water treatment facility started to fail on Monday, forcing the National Guard to take up the responsibility until the water treatment plant is back online. However, the distribution itself proved to be unsustainable as residents of all ages were seen waiting in lines more than a mile long at Hawks Field Airport for at least two hours on Tuesday for just one case of bottled water.

Distributing Water

The event was initially scheduled to span three hours but barely ran two as people were eventually turned away when the 700 cases of water ran out. An 86-year-old Jeraldine Watts, said, "I keep saying we're going to be the next Michigan. And it looks like that's exactly what we're headed for."

Lumumba said that the city was already working on more water distribution events to help the citizens of the region. The Mississippi Emergency Management Agency will also provide nearly 30 water trucks to help supplement the city events.

On Tuesday, Jackson State football coach Deion Sanders said in an Instagram video that his program and players are now in "crisis mode" when it comes to grappling with the multiple water problems that have devastated the region's capital city in the last week.

On Tuesday, parts of Jackson were without running water because flooding exacerbated long-standing problems in one of two water-treatment plants. The city of roughly 150,000 people had already been under a boil-water notice for roughly a month, ESPN reported.