A group of Jackson, Mississippi, residents filed a class action lawsuit on Friday over the water crisis that left over 150,000 people in the city without access to clean running water.
This is the first federal class action lawsuit seeking damages “against various government and private engineering defendants” for the alleged “neglect, mismanagement, and maintenance failures” that led to a complete shutdown of Jackson’s water system in August 2022, according to a news release.
The lawsuit names the city of Jackson, current Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba, former Mayor Tony Yarber, and former city public works directors, as well as private engineering companies, such as Siemens Corporation and Trilogy Engineering Services LLC, as defendants.
The lawsuit alleges that even before the water crisis that left residents without running water for nearly seven weeks, “Jackson’s water supply was not fit for human consumption due to the high levels of lead and other contaminants,” which violates the plaintiffs’ right to bodily integrity.
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Jackson is the state capital, Mississippi’s largest city, and 83% of its residents are Black.
“This public health crisis, decades in the making, was wholly foreseeable by Defendants’ actions and has left Jackson residents in an untenable position – without access to clean, safe water in 2022 in a major United States city,” the lawsuit says.
As a result of the water crisis, the plaintiffs in the lawsuit allege they weren’t able to “readily go about normal daily activities like using the bathroom, brushing [their] teeth, and cooking.”
The four plaintiffs named in the suit claim they suffered loss of income and emotional distress because of the city’s contaminated water, with some experiencing “various health problems” from consuming it — including dehydration, malnutrition, lead poisoning, brain injuries, hair loss and skin rashes — according to the lawsuit.
One of the plaintiffs, Raine Becker, 44, has lived in Jackson for two years with her 7-year-old terminally-ill son, Shylar. Shylar has a heart defect and liver disease which requires a feeding tube that has to be flushed with water, Becker told NBC News.
According to the lawsuit, children make up a quarter of Jackson’s residents and “are especially susceptible to the devastating and life-long damages of lead poisoning.”
“I didn’t have clean, sanitary water provided to me for my son,” Becker said. “And if you think about how catastrophic that would be for a healthy person, you can think about how much more catastrophic it would be for an unhealthy person.”
Becker says she didn’t know about the city’s water infrastructure issue until it made the news in August 2022.
“It didn’t have to get to this point,” she said. “They knew what was happening. They knew what the outcome was going to be, and they just waited for it to happen.”
Lumumba’s spokesperson, Melissa F. Payne, said the mayor’s office has no comment at this time due to pending litigation.
Late last month, Lumumba told reporters the city had been dealing with the water crisis “for the better part of two years.”
“I have said on multiple occasions that it’s a not a matter of if our system would fail, but a matter of when our system would fail,” he said at the time.
Siemens Corporation also had no comment due to pending litigation.
Former Mayor Tony Yarber and Trilogy Engineering Services LLC did not immediately return NBC News requests for comment.
One of the attorneys for the plaintiffs, Mark Chalos, said the defendants named in the lawsuit “were responsible for maintaining the water system” but “haven’t done what they were supposed to do.”
“It’s absolutely a shame that a capital city, the most populous city in the state, in 2022, cannot provide safe, clean water to its residents,” Chalos told NBC News. “There’s certainly plenty of blame to go around, and our investigation continues and we’ll see where it leads.”
Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves declared a state of emergency late August, saying the water crisis in Jackson threatened “critical needs” after rain and flooding pushed the Pearl River to dangerous levels, according to officials. President Joe Biden also approved an emergency declaration in the state on Aug. 30, freeing up federal resources to help manage the crisis.
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“Until it is fixed, it means we do not have reliable running water at scale,” Reeves said in a statement at the time. “It means the city cannot produce enough water to reliably flush toilets, fight fire and meet other critical needs.”
Reeves announced last week that a boil-water advisory for the city had been lifted after nearly seven weeks of the water crisis, adding that clean water had been restored but “the system is still imperfect.”
“It is possible, although I pray not inevitable, that there will be further interruption,” he said. “We cannot perfectly predict what will go wrong with such a broken system.”
Chalos says statements made by officials that the city’s water is now safe to drink have not necessarily won the trust of all residents.
“Many residents have lost trust in the leadership who are telling them that and are very skeptical of any proclamation from a government official that the water is now magically safe for them to drink,” Chalos said.
As well as unspecified compensatory and economic damages, the lawsuit seeks remediation that includes the removal of lead pipes, an adequate water supply delivered to each home, and an injunction preventing Jackson residents from paying for contaminated water.
A team from the Environmental Protection Agency’s inspector general’s office is conducting a top-to-bottom review of what caused Jackson’s water crisis.
In 2020, the agency issued a lengthy report outlining major shortfalls in the city’s water system, which included a failure to replace lead pipes, faulty monitoring equipment and inadequate staffing.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
