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In Jackson, Miss., residents were already boiling their water for a month before floodwaters from heavy rain overwhelmed the city’s fragile water treatment system, cutting off water pressure. On Sept. 5 water pressure was restored, but it’s still hard to find a cup of coffee in the city, with Starbucks and other businesses posting signs announcing indefinite closures due to Jackson’s continuing boil-water notice.
It’s a tragically common occurrence for the majority Black city, where roads, water mains, and other infrastructure is crumbling beneath residents’ feet. But a few miles north in the majority-white suburb of Madison, the water never stopped flowing.
When we think of the effects of climate change, we tend to imagine the most cinematic examples: floodwaters creeping up through the porous limestone under Miami, wildfires overwhelming towns in California, hurricane-force winds whipping between the skyscrapers of Manhattan. But what activists and researchers have been saying for years is that those disasters are only part of the story, with climate change also exacerbating the slow social disasters of poverty and discrimination.
The reasons behind Jackson’s water crisis are complicated. But it’s hard to avoid the fact that the flooding that barely touched people’s lives in white suburbs, and which didn’t break recent records, caused the bottom to fall out of a poorer, majority-Black city, whose infrastructure had been so depleted over the years that the heavy rains were essentially the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Read more at the link in bio. Photograph by Christopher Lee (@theotherchrislee) for TIME
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