In America, we generally expect that when you turn on your faucet, a) you will receive water, and b) it’ll be relatively clean. The processes of getting our tap water clean and to our homes is out of sight and out of mind, and the same can be said for most other infrastructure. We turn on our lights, we turn up the heat, we turn on the tap, and we expect it to work. Until it doesn’t.

A 2018 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that in 2015, over 21 million Americans were reliant on a water system that violated Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) health standards. Every so often, these failures are significant enough that they make the news. One of the most infamous cases of drinking water infrastructural and administrational failure happened in Flint, Michigan. A change in the city’s water source led to corrosion in lead pipes, exposing Flint residents to levels of lead far higher than allowed under EPA regulations, along with their serious public health effects. Eight years on, the Flint crisis is still ongoing, and city residents are continuing to fight for clean water and compensation for lead poisoning.

Flint is far from alone. Across the board, most infrastructure is critically underfunded and dangerously close to failure. Drinking water is no exception. The American Society of Civil Engineers’ Infrastructure Report Card rated the nation’s drinking water a C- and stated that “[f]unding for drinking water infrastructure has not kept pace with the growing need to address aging infrastructure systems, and current funding sources do not meet the total needs.” Adding to the problem is climate change, which is making extreme weather events occur more often and with greater intensity. More climate-resilient infrastructure won’t be built if existing infrastructure is chronically underfunded and out-of-date.

This summer, another city was hit with a water crisis. Jackson, Mississippi experienced a failure of its major water treatment plant following heavy rains and flooding, leaving the city of around 150,000 people without clean drinking water. The catastrophic failure of water systems upended life for Jackson residents. USA News reported that the plant failure meant schools and businesses were forced to close. In addition to having to find water to drink, bathe, and cook, some residents were unable to go to work or find childcare. The city’s boil-water notice was recently lifted, but the crisis isn’t over yet, and public trust in these basic services has dropped dramatically.

The catalyst for this failure was a major storm, but the city’s infrastructure had been on the decline far before the storm hit. Going back as far as the 1950s, white flight from Jackson began a cycle of underinvestment. As wealthier white residents left the city, lower-income families remained, and the tax base of Jackson shifted. Most of Jackson’s residents, who are bearing the brunt of this water crisis and others, are Black. The deep roots of environmental racism and classism have continued to plague the city’s infrastructure. This latest crisis, while noteworthy, is one in a long line of water problems for the city. Another recent crisis in February 2021 led to a monthlong boil-water advisory.

Perhaps the worst part of the Jackson water crisis is that the city and its residents knew about the problems with the drinking water system before the catastrophe began. Mississippi’s government actively avoided the city’s requests for more funds to fix their water system. In 2021, the city requested $47 million in state funds to improve their water system, but the state only provided $3 million. Yet the state government has blamed the city’s management and understaffing as the cause of the crisis. The state’s leaders have expressed their disdain for the city in unsubtle ways; Mississippi governor Tate Reeves, a month into the crisis, quipped that “as always,” today was “a great day to not be in Jackson.” 

No matter who’s to blame, more funding is essential to prevent another water crisis in Jackson or any other city in the nation. The Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality grant program has $450 million from the American Rescue Plan available for drinking water, wastewater, and stormwater projects. Yet in a press conference, Jackson mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba claimed that fixing Jackson’s water distribution problems would cost at least $1 billion. At the national level, $50 billion of the $550 billion of the Biden Administration’s 2021 infrastructure package was devoted to drinking water, touted by the administration as “the largest investment in clean drinking water and wastewater infrastructure in American history.” While this is laudable, estimates for what it would cost to totally fix this country’s water infrastructure range from $750 billion to over $1 trillion. 

And it’s not just water that’s underfunded and failing. The February 2021 storm that caused Jackson’s boil-water advisory also took down infrastructure further west, for many of the same reasons as the Jackson crisis – underfunding; aging, non-climate-resilient infrastructure; failures of the government (mostly at the state level) to adequately prevent a crisis. This wasn’t a story primarily about water, but about electricity. This is the same storm that infamously took down Texas’ power grid. 

With Jackson, the water crisis can be traced back to at least the 1950s and 1960s, where the changing tax base of the city kickstarted a vicious cycle of underinvestment. In Texas, we can point to 1999 and the deregulation of the Texas grid, leaving it critically underfunded, mismanaged, and vulnerable. A main component of Texas’ grid deregulation was that it made Texas its own standalone grid, separated from the other two national electricity grids. This culminated in key infrastructure freezing during the storm, and without the ability to draw electricity from other grids, millions were left without power, causing many people to lose heat and clean water. Over 200 people died because of the blackout.

As with water infrastructure, the Texas grid isn’t the only electricity system feeling strained. Earlier this month, California narrowly avoided blackouts as heat waves lead to skyrocketing electricity demand. And even more recently than the Jackson crisis, Hurricane Fiona devastated Puerto Rico’s power grid, which was still extremely fragile after Hurricane Maria five years prior. The United States’ energy infrastructure received a C-, the same grade as drinking water infrastructure, from the American Society of Civil Engineers, who also claim in their analysis that severe weather was the predominant cause of transmission outages from 2014-2018. The link between climate change and severe weather will only make these outages more likely.

The catastrophe in Texas might have been avoided, or the damage significantly reduced, had Texas heeded the advice of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) following a similar blackout almost exactly ten years prior in February 2011. In a report on that blackout, one of FERC’s key findings was that while the February 2011 storm was uncommon, it was not unprecedented and entirely unexpected. Previous winter storms had led to recommendations that Texas weatherize its grid – that is, make it more storm-resilient and able to operate in cold weather.

This might sound suspiciously like the dominant talking point pushed by renewable energy opponents during the storm. The grid failed, goes the narrative, because wind turbines froze, and the turbine failures could not provide enough electricity to the grid. This is misleading at best. For one, wind turbines can operate perfectly in much colder climates than Texas; one only needs to look to the proliferation of wind power in Scandinavia to conclude as much. But it’s true – the wind turbines in Texas did freeze. So did everything else. A Texas Tribune article in the wake of the grid failure estimated that wind power only made up about 7% of the state’s electricity mix, while around 80% came from natural gas, coal, and nuclear energy. A senior director for ERCOT, Texas’ grid regulators, shared with reporters that the main cause of the blackouts came from natural gas failures. And the state government, despite being warned of this exact scenario at least ten years prior, did not take the actions necessary to prevent it from happening.

The rhetoric and finger-pointing that emerged in Texas last year and Jackson this year only underscore a bitter truth about American infrastructure: we’re not paying enough attention to it. Either we direct our attention to the infrastructure we can most easily see, like roads and bridges, which received $110 billion in the Biden Administration’s funding package that promised the record $50 billion to clean water. Or, more accurately, the people with the most power to fix the situation aren’t paying enough attention. Federal regulators were ringing the alarm about the Texas grid for over a decade, and Jackson has been facing water failure after water failure. Both calls went unheard by their respective state governments.

So, how do we move forward from here? The simple yet painful answer is that we need to boost infrastructure funding across the board. This isn’t what governments and taxpayers want to hear, at least for the short term – just look at Mayor Lumumba’s price tag for fixing Jackson’s water system. But taking a longer view, if we fail to address the cracks in the system, they’ll only grow. Jackson, Texas, and cities and states around the country shouldn’t have to cross their fingers every time a storm hits and hope for the best. The longer we wait to fund infrastructure projects, the more expensive their price tag becomes. Underinvestment adds up. How many crises will we experience before we take action?