Water crisis in Mississippi Transcript

Speaker 1: (00:00)
This morning, people in Jackson, Mississippi are being told to expect little or no water for an undetermined amount of time. Shoppers raced to this Walmart for bottled water last night only to find empty shelves. All Jackson public schools are switching to virtual learning indefinitely. And the Lieutenant governor says, “Our understanding is the water and sewer system serving 250,000 citizens of the state and numerous businesses is at the brink of collapsing.”

Speaker 2: (00:29)
It means the city cannot produce enough water to fight fires, to reliably flush toilets.

Speaker 1: (00:36)
In some parts of the city, the fire department is finding no water in fire hydrants.

Speaker 3: (00:41)
All of our units have 500 gallons of water on it, and the guys can use that water to sustain a lot of incidents with just that.

Speaker 1: (00:51)
The warnings come after a pump at the city’s troubled water treatment facility was damaged. The governor says he was told last week that a failure was possible.

Speaker 2: (01:01)
There was a near certainty that Jackson would fail to produce running water sometime in the next several weeks or months. Unfortunately, that failure appears to have begun today.

Speaker 1: (01:12)
Jackson residents have been under boiled water notices since last month when water samples found harmful contaminant levels. The mayor blames issues of the city’s water and sewage plants on staffing shortages and decades of deferred maintenance. And now flooding from the Pearl river is making the problem even worse.

Speaker 4: (01:32)
And because of the river water that is coming into the plant, we have to change the way we treat the water, which consequently reduces the tank levels.

Speaker 1: (01:42)
So the governor has now called in the national guard to help distribute bottled water.

George Stephanopoulos: (01:48)
Hi everyone, George Stephanopoulos here. Thanks for checking out the ABC news YouTube channel. If you’d like to get more videos, show highlights and watch live event coverage, click on the right over here to subscribe to our channel. And don’t forget to download the ABC News app for breaking news alerts. Thanks for watching.