JACKSON, Miss.—Last Thursday, a storm shut down water production at Jackson’s O.B. Curtis Water Treatment Plant for the third time this decade so far. Across Mississippi’s capital city, water tanks drained and pipe pressure dropped, faucets trickling—first in South Jackson and then across the city.
But what followed was not the weeks-long outage of years past. Power was restored to O.B. Curtis in short order Friday morning, water production spun up, and within hours, Jackson’s water system was back to normal.
On Saturday, after one day of a mandatory boil water notice, tests showed the system was still all clear. After years of dysfunctional plant performance, O.B. Curtis has now weathered two challenges without prolonged disruptions in a matter of months—a far cry from its collapse in the late summer of 2022 that took weeks to repair.
Heavy winds from storms late on May 9 caused numerous power outages across the greater Jackson area. A switch at O.B. Curtis provides an alternative feed of power in the case of outages like Thursday night’s, but activating the switch is a manual process, and workers were not able to do so until early Friday morning after several hours of power loss at the facility.
“Probably as late as last fall—even winter—if we had had this same situation, recovery would be days, not hours,” JXN Water Interim Third Party Manager Ted Henifin said on Friday, May 10, 2024. Photo by Nick Judin
“By the time power came back on our pressure sensors were showing we were below the required 20 PSI in many parts of the distribution system; out of an abundance of caution, we issued that precautionary boil water notice citywide,” Ted Henifin, the federally-appointed manager for the Jackson water system, explained at a Friday morning press avail.
The lack of backup onsite power at O.B. Curtis is a problem that regulators have highlighted for decades. “Typically this two-feed system has worked very well,” Henifin said. “Entergy has (always) responded quickly to make that happen.”
But, like many problems at O.B. Curtis, the persistent need for a more permanent solution is finally
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