Jackson, MS Water Crisis

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IMADreamer
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Re: Jackson, MS Water Crisis

Post by IMADreamer »

Hey this is a topic I have a little bit of experience with as when I was younger I took a weekend job at our local water plant to make extra money to buy my first business. You are correct in that there is no excuse for flooding to cause an extended outage. It's just piss poor planning or more likely a certainly political party going around saying "govt doesn't work and we are going to prove it by underfunding it." It obviously makes sense for a plant to be built near the source of the water, but it doesn't have to be built in the flood zone. Our plant along with many plants along rivers and streams are built up on top of the hill above the water out of harms way. At our local plant I worked at inlets were located down in the water, but the pumps themselves were nearly 20ft above the water line.

Also and not that it matters, most plants in the US don't use UV light to purify they use sand and charcoal filters. Water is pumped into first through a series of weirs that settle out the big stuff. Then gravity flows it over to the sand and charcoal filters where gravity does it's thing again and the water comes out into what we called the clear well which was the clean water. Chemicals are added at various points for various reasons. We added Chlorine, Fluoride, Sulfuric Acid, Lime, Carbon Black, and one or two times a year a couple other chemicals I don't remember. It's a really simple process in the end.

Again there is no reason for a plant to go down other than some really piss poor planning.

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Joe Shlabotnik
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Re: Jackson, MS Water Crisis

Post by Joe Shlabotnik »

IMADreamer wrote:
September 2 22, 3:38 pm

Again there is no reason for a plant to go down other than some really piss poor planning.
Or starving. This is the endgame of libertarian GOP policies to destroy government. And, of course, they have it both ways. Starve the system and then blame the system when it can't perform any longer. Classic.

Arthur Dent
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Re: Jackson, MS Water Crisis

Post by Arthur Dent »

This is about the most detailed info I can find. Seems bad but much less dire than claimed. I feel like maybe the political conflict is such that people want to lean into that aspect to score points when perhaps the technical problem is quite solvable.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nat ... 937552001/

Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba said Jackson’s water system is troubled by short staffing and “decades of deferred maintenance.” He said the influx of water from torrential rain changed the chemical composition needed for treatment, which slowed the process of pushing water out to customers.



Lumumba’s Chief of Staff, Dr. Safiya Omari, told council members that despite some dire predictions of continued low pressure following the weekend flooding, “the system has been recovering quite well.”

On Tuesday, the water pressure was at 78 pounds, only nine points off its target of 87. Because the pressure dropped below 65 during the flood, the city's boil-water notice would likely continue for the immediate future, Omari said.

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