Tag: Floods

Mississippi Does It Again!

My state of Mississippi has been in the news lately and not for too many positive things…..Roe decision…..upholds Jim Crow laws….and now the neglect that has come to bite the people of the state in the ass.

Around the capitol city of Jackson is paying a hard price for our politicians neglect….the infrastructure….

For the 150,000 or so residents of Jackson, Miss., the water situation is a mess. The capital city’s main treatment plant was on the brink of collapse, with most households having little or no water pressure. And if residents are lucky enough to have a trickle from their faucets, that water isn’t safe to drink, reports the New York Times. Public schools have switched to virtual learning in the interim, and local businesses were scrambling. Coverage:

  • Emergency: “Until it is fixed, it means we do not have reliable running water at scale,” said Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves in a briefing Monday evening. “It means the city cannot produce enough water to fight fires, to reliably flush toilets, and to meet other critical needs.” Reeves declared an emergency and said the state was mobilizing to provide bottled water for residents and a tanker system for firefighters, but he warned that the logistics of such an effort were “massively complicated.”

Latest trouble: This week, heavy rains caused the Pearl River to flood city streets, and though the flooding itself wasn’t as bad as initially feared, it worsened already existing water problems in the city and affected the OB Curtis treatment plant. The facility had to drastically cut water production because of the flooding’s effect on a nearby reservoir, reports WLBT.

  • Earlier issues: The city already had been under a “boil water” advisory for a month because of poor water quality, reports CNN. In fact, the Curtis plant has been operating on backup pumps for weeks because of unspecified damage to its main pumps. And in February 2021, the city’s entire water system shut down during a winter storm, with aging pipes and mains bursting and leaving residents without water for weeks.
  • ‘Failure’: Gov. Reeves said the state began preparing over the weekend “for a scenario where Jackson would be without running water for an extended period,” per CNN. “All of this was with the prayer that we would have more time before their system ran to failure,” the governor said. “Unfortunately, that failure appears to have begun [Monday].”
  • The mayor: Reeves didn’t invite Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba to his news conference, notes Mississippi Today. Earlier Monday, Lumumba declared a “water system emergency” but suggested the water-pressure issues might be resolved in a few days. Reeves painted a more dire picture. The GOP governor said he hadn’t spoken directly with the Democratic mayor as of Monday evening, but he said the mayor had agreed to cooperate with state officials.

This is for those that would like to know more about the failure of Mississippi government….

As many as 180,000 people in Jackson, Mississippi will not have access to safe running water for the foreseeable future, state officials said Monday night—the latest manifestation of a longstanding crisis in which the city’s residents have been made to suffer the consequences of chronically underfunded infrastructure, compounded by a worsening climate emergency.

“Do not drink the water,” Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves said at a press conference. “In too many cases, it is raw water from the reservoir being pushed through the pipes. Be smart, protect yourself, protect your family, preserve water, look out for your fellow man, and look out for your neighbors.”

Reeves, a Republican who has refused to prioritize upgrading Jackson’s failing infrastructure throughout his two years in office, declared a state of emergency and announced, “We need to provide water for up to 180,000 people for an unknown period of time.”

“This is a very different situation from a boil-water notice,” Reeves continued. “Until it is fixed, we do not have reliable running water at scale. The city cannot produce enough water to fight fires, to flush toilets, and to meet other critical needs. The Mississippi Emergency Management Agency will take the state’s lead on distributing drinking water and non-drinking water to residents of the City of Jackson.”

https://www.salon.com/2022/08/31/repeatedly-opposed-infrastructure-upgrades-now-mississippis-capital-has-no-safe-water_partner/

As usual the state government can only react to a disaster for they are not smart enough to foresee any disaster approaching.

As bad as their governing is the voter will buy into their nonsense and re-elect the dullards to continue to screw the people of this state.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Biofuel And Poverty

Oxfam says so-called green policies in developed countries are contributing to the world’s soaring food prices, which hit the poor hardest.

The group also says biofuels will do nothing to combat climate change.

Its report urges the EU to scrap a target of making 10% of all transport run on renewable resources by 2020.

Oxfam estimates the EU’s target could multiply carbon emissions 70-fold by 2020 by changing the use of land.

The report’s author, Oxfam’s biofuel policy adviser Rob Bailey, criticised rich countries for using subsidies and tax breaks to encourage the use of food crops for alternative sources of energy like ethanol.

“If the fuel value for a crop exceeds its food value, then it will be used for fuel instead,” he said.

“Rich countries… are making climate change worse, not better, they are stealing crops and land away from food production, and they are destroying millions of livelihoods in the process.”

I ask which direction will the crop go after the floods?  The recent flooding in the Midwest has destroyed thousands of acres of corn, especially.  Will the remaining crop go for biofuel or for food?  The answer will be–where is the greatest profit?

The Midwest Floods

The flooding in the US Midwest, which has caused billions of dollars in damage and left tens of thousands homeless, has exposed the neglect and incompetence of the state and federal authorities charged with protecting lives and property along US waterways.

More than 20 levees have failed, topped or breached by floodwaters, with cities and towns along the upper Mississippi and its tributaries inundated and hundreds of thousands of acres of prime agricultural land underwater.

Damage to agriculture is still being assessed. One official with the US Department of Agriculture estimated that 160,000 acres of cropland in Illinois alone have been affected. Previous estimates indicated that 9 percent of Iowa’s corn crop and 8 percent of its soybean crop were flooded. The impact on already spiraling food prices is expected to be significant.

The wholesale failure of the flood protection system in the upper Midwest points to deep systemic problems that highlight the chaos and irrationality endemic to capitalism. There have been a number of media reports pointing out that the failure of the flood protection system had been long predicted.

The human impact of the floods has been severe. The paltry amounts of money doled out by federal disaster relief programs will not begin to compensate for the damage suffered by thousands of homeowners and small businesses. According to a report in the Associated Press, when the town of Gulfport, Illinois on the Mississippi flooded, only 28 homeowners had flood insurance. They were told by FEMA they didn’t need it because the levees were secure against a 100-year flood.

According to a report carried by AP “some FEMA floodplain maps are 20 years old and seriously outdated, based on old evaluations of levees and river conditions.” Nationally, only a tiny percentage of homeowners carry flood insurance, which is often exorbitantly expensive.

Now that floodwaters are subsiding, the attention of the big business politicians and the media is shifting away from the flood-devastated regions, leaving tens of thousands of ordinary people to try to put their lives together as best they can.

The wholesale breakdown of the flood protection system is not simply the result of policy failures of this or that administration. The capitalist system and its political representatives are incapable of implementing the kind of systematic response that is needed which would include upgrading levees, wetland restoration, diversion channels and a range of other measures.

The Midwest floods again demonstrate that the complex needs of mass society are incompatible with a system that subordinates production and economic development to private profit. The stranglehold of private wealth over all facets of economic and political life in the United States insures that no appropriate lessons will be drawn from this round of catastrophic flooding—any more than they were from 1993 and Katrina—and that future and even worse disasters are inevitable.