A Water System So Broken That One Pipe Leaks 5 Million Gallons a Day
JACKSON, Miss. — On an abandoned golf course, overgrown with shrubs and saw grass, you can hear the rushing water from 100 yards away.
Near Hole 4, past the little bridge and crumbling cart paths, what looks to be a waterfall comes into view, pouring down through the brush and into the creek below. Except the torrent of water gushing up through the mud isn’t from a spring-fed stream or a bubbling brook.
It is spewing from a broken city water line.
As residents had to boil their tap water and businesses closed because their faucets were dry, the break at the old Colonial Country Club squandered an estimated 5 million gallons of drinking water a day in a city that had none to spare.