EPA inspector general is probing Jackson, Mississippi, water crisis
A team from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Inspector General arrived in Jackson, Mississippi, last week to begin a review of the city's water.
JACKSON, Miss. — A team from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Inspector General arrived in Jackson last week to begin a “multidisciplinary” top-to-bottom review of the current drinking water crisis, an agency spokesperson told NBC News.
“The EPA OIG is keenly interested and concerned about what is happening in Jackson, Mississippi,” said the spokesperson, Jennifer Kaplan. “Last week, we began sending OIG personnel to collect data and conduct interviews, and over the coming week we expect to announce work related to the city’s water system.”
The inspector general’s office is staffed by teams of auditors, evaluators and criminal investigators; the office did not say which specific teams were deployed to Jackson.
In recent years, the issues with Jackson’s water system have come under scrutiny from state and federal regulatory officials, who have flagged problems ranging from inadequate staffing at the city’s main water treatment plant to delays in carrying out needed repairs.
Residents recently experienced a dayslong outage of running water, and even now more than 150,000 residents in Mississippi’s capital still lack clean drinking water. Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves said Friday that a citywide boil-water notice in effect since July 29 was unlikely to be lifted over the weekend.
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