Jackson, Mississippi Residents File Class Action Lawsuit Over Water Crisis

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Jackson, Mississippi; its mayor, Chokwe A. Lumumba; and the companies tasked with designing, operating and overseeing the city’s public drinking water system have been hit with a proposed class action lawsuit amid a crisis that for weeks left more than 150,000 residents without access to drinkable running water. 

The 96-page complaint was filed on September 16, the same day a city-wide boil-water advisory was lifted after being in place for more than 40 days. Last month, Jackson’s water supply, after being “neglected for decades” and “on the brink of total failure for years,” was shut down almost entirely as city officials were unable to provide residents with a timeline of when adequate, reliable service would be restored. 

According to the lawsuit, more than 82 percent of Jackson’s residents are Black, and more than 24 percent live in poverty. Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves declared a state of emergency in Jackson on August 30, after heavy river flooding late that month damaged the city’s primary water treatment facility. 

“These residents lack more than just drinking water, or water for making powdered baby formula, cooking, showering, or laundry,” the filing states. “During the long period where the city pipes had no water pressure—and were unable to facilitate the flow of water—residents of Jackson could not flush their toilets for days at a time.” 

The lawsuit, which also names as defendants former Jackson Mayor Tony Yarber, former Public Works Directors Kishia Powell and Robert Miller, and former Interim Public Works Director Jerriot Smash, says that even before the recent crisis, Jackson’s water supply was “not fit for human consumption” due to high levels of lead and other contaminants. Moreover, the suit says that numerous burst pipes and water main ruptures during storms last winter left the defendants “acutely aware” of the issues that would later contribute to the recent water crisis, yet the parties “did not fix the system,” leaving it instead “dependent on decayed equipment and structurally fragile.” 

According to the complaint, the Jackson water supply crisis, “decades in the making, was wholly foreseeable” by the defendants, and has left residents, who the suit says have become “tragically numb” to increasingly frequent boil-water advisories, in an “untenable position.” 

The plaintiffs and other Jackson residents—including children, who reportedly make up almost 25 percent of the city’s population—have been “poisoned by lead and other contaminants” that were released into the city’s drinking water as a result of the defendants’ “conscience-shocking conduct and deliberate indifference,” the suit charges. 

Jackson’s public water system consists of the O.B. Curtis Water Treatment Plant and J.H. Fewell Water Treatment Plant, as well as a number of groundwater wells and collection, treatment, storage and distribution facilities, the filing relays. Per the case, Jackson has “an aging network of pipes,” some of which “are over 100 years old,” meant to deliver drinking water and remove wastewater. 

The suit states that Jackson’s public water system and its pipes contain “significant amounts of lead,” in part due to lead joints found every 20 feet. The case says that between 2010 and 2013, triennial testing showed “an alarming increase” in lead found in Jackson’s water, high enough that concerns should have been raised with regard to residents’ health. 

According to the complaint, Jackson and Lumumba ignored the warnings of the city’s former interim director of public works, Willie Bell, that there were issues with the pH levels in Jackson’s water, and that the city needed to alter its corrosion control treatment method. Although Bell presented a proposal to the city, including estimated repair costs of $400,000, then-mayor Chokwe Lumumba, the current mayor Lumumba’s father, who built these costs into the city’s budget, passed away in February 2014, the lawsuit relays. 

Yarber, who was elected in April 2014 to finish Lumumba’s term, removed the water system improvement projects from the city’s budget, despite being aware of “Jackson’s need for a corrosion control system and other upgrades,” the complaint states. 

“All the while, the City continued to ignore alarms regarding malfunctioning and nonfunctioning corrosion treatment methods,” the suit alleges, claiming “[s]everal high-ranking figures in Jackson’s government” were aware of the decreasing pH of the city’s water and increasing lead levels yet took no action. 

From there, Jackson officials made matters worse by switching a section of the city’s water source from well water to surface water, which significantly impacted the drinking water quality and safety for all residents, the case says. 

“The decision was a catastrophic one for thousands of Jackson water customers given the fragile balance of pH then in place in Jackson’s [public water system],” the suit reads. 

Further, the lawsuit alleges defendants Yarber, Powell and other officials made “numerous false statements” that either explicitly or otherwise strongly implied that Jackson’s water was safe to drink, “when, in fact, it was not.” Among the statements was one in which Powell falsely claimed that Jackson’s water problem was “nowhere near the levels seen in Flint [Michigan],” which in turn “induced” the city’s residents to “take actions that were dangerous to their health and the health of their children and to avoid taking actions that might mitigate that harm,” the filing states. 

According to the lawsuit, Jackson hired defendant Trilogy Engineering Services LLC in April 2016 to conduct a corrosion control optimization study. The case alleges Trilogy “ma[de] the situation worse” by recommending that the city retrofit the O.B. Curtis Water Treatment Plant’s liquid lime system with a system that uses soda ash to control corrosion levels by raising the pH of the water. 

The city discovered in 2018 that the retrofitted system was “not an adequate solution to the process” since the soda ash would clump as it went into the distribution system, the suit relays. 

“Any reasonable water systems engineer would have understood the challenges and hazards of attempting to retrofit a liquid lime-based corrosion control system to a solid soda ash-based corrosion control system—particularly in light of previous internal assessments that the liquid lime system had not been functioning properly,” the complaint states, alleging Trilogy “knew or should have known” that soda ash would likely cause problems in the system’s pipes and pumps. 

Defendants Siemens Corporation and Siemens Industry, for their part, “ruined key elements” of the Jackson public water system while draining the city of vital resources to fix the problem, the lawsuit charges. 

“The work performed by the Siemens Defendants severely impaired the City of Jackson’s ability to charge for water services, resulting in nearly $175 million in lost revenue,” the filing alleges. “As a result of problems with the [public water system] caused by the Siemens Defendants, and lack of revenue from it, the City of Jackson did not have the attention or resources to repair and maintain the [public water system] or address known problems with equipment, infrastructure, and staffing.” 

The lawsuit looks to cover all persons who resided in Hinds County and have been exposed to water from Jackson’s public water system at any time from January 1, 2009 to the present. 

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