JACKSON, Mississippi (Dispatches) -- Residents of Jackson, Miss., recently experienced a week without reliable water service. And an advisory to boil any water that does flow from faucets in that capital city of 150,000 people has been in place since late July.
This is just some of the alarming drinking-water-related news that has surfaced as summer winds down in the U.S. Other reports have told of arsenic in tap water in a New York City public housing complex, potentially sewage- or runoff-related Escherichia coli bacteria in West Baltimore’s water supply and a lawsuit alleging neurological issues linked to thousands of liters of jet fuel that leaked into drinking water in Hawaii last year.
In the aftermath of the drinking-water contamination crisis that hit Flint, Mich., in 2014, a growing number of similar incidents have received national attention, eroding confidence in neglected drinking-water and wastewater treatment systems that once were considered among the world’s most sophisticated and robust.
Some ground will be gained as billions of dollars from the Biden administration’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law start to flow to states for improvements to local water systems—including the replacement of dangerous lead pipes that run from public water lines to buildings’ plumbing. But money alone cannot solve larger structural and systemic issues afflicting the nation’s thousands of aging public and private water and wastewater systems, experts say.
Upmanu Lall, a hydroclimatologist at Columbia University and a luminary in his field, has co-authored and led numerous studies that document the rise of contaminated drinking water in the U.S.
He and his colleagues assessed a national data set of 17,900 water utilities and other community drinking-water systems, revealing that water-quality violations of the U.S. Safe Drinking Water Act more than doubled between 1980 and 2015.
In the latter year, drinking-water systems serving nearly 21 million people in the U.S. were cited for such water-quality violations.
“Jackson is one of many cities where things like this are happening. It is perhaps one of the larger such crises. And it’s a more chronic one,” Lall told Scientific American.
“One big concern is the California drought. The agriculture industry there is at an extremely high risk of dying. And that will have an impact on the food supply. More generally, we will see a slowly evolving epidemic of water system failures like the one in Jackson.”