Category: Regional News

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Mississippi prisons will reopen to visitors on Nov. 1 after being closed in late July when the state was seeing a rapid increase in COVID-19 cases, Corrections Commissioner Burl Cain said Thursday.

Mississippi’s coronavirus transmission rate has decreased in recent weeks.

“Given the drop in COVID cases, it is appropriate and beneficial for inmates to be able to see their relatives and reopening will also allow for them to participate in more programs,” Cain said in a news release. “We’re trying to return to normal, but not too fast.”

Visitors will have to follow safety protocols, including having their temperature checked and answering screening questions at entry. They will have to wear masks and maintain social distance. Inmates will have to have their temperature checked and wear masks.

Deputy Commissioner of Institutions Jeworski Mallett said the decision to reopen visitation was based on discussions with state health officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs and medical providers for the Department of Corrections. He said the department also reviewed state health statistics.

The Mississippi Department of Corrections began giving COVID-19 vaccinations to inmates in March.

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Two new lawsuits claim hundreds of children have been exposed to dangerous lead levels through the drinking water in Mississippi’s capital city, which has been facing water system problems for years.

One lawsuit represents one child, while the other has hundreds of children as plaintiffs. The suits, filed Tuesday in federal court in Jackson, say the city of Jackson and the state Health Department have made “conscience-shocking decisions and have shown deliberate indifference that have led to Plaintiffs’ exposure to toxic lead in Jackson’s drinking water.”

“Access to clean drinking water should be a fundamental right in this country,” one of the attorneys who filed the lawsuits, Corey M. Stern, said in a news release. Stern is based in New York and has represented people who sued over tainted water in Flint, Michigan.

Attorneys for Jackson are reviewing the lawsuits and “the city will eventually have a response,” city spokesman Justin Vicory said Wednesday.

The lawsuits seek unspecified amounts of money for punitive damages and compensatory damages, plus attorneys’ fees and “other relief the Court deems appropriate.”

Jackson has about 160,000 residents, and the city has longstanding problems with water quality and distribution.

Since July 1, Jackson has been under a safe drinking water consent order with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which sets a schedule for work on water treatment facilities and delivery systems.

The EPA examined Jackson’s water treatment plants in February 2020 at the request of the state Health Department. The agency found conditions presented “an imminent and substantial endangerment to the persons served by the system.”

The EPA sent the city an emergency order over the water system in March 2020, along with notices of noncompliance in May 2020 and April of this year. The consent order requires Jackson to determine the number of lead service distribution lines in its system and to develop a plan for gradually replacing them.

When a severe cold snap hit large parts of the South early this year, parts of Jackson’s water system froze. That left thousands of customers without running water for weeks, forcing some businesses to close. Once service was restored, some customers still had to boil water for a month.

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — A Jackson-based company has announced plans to build a green hydrogen hub in Mississippi it says will be the largest of its kind in the U.S. and create an easier pathway for hard-to-decarbonize manufacturing industries to move away from fossil fuels.

Connected across multiple sites traversing approximately 200 miles (320 kilometers) in southern Mississippi, Hy Stor Energy’s Mississippi Clean Hydrogen Hub will produce, store and deliver green hydrogen that is 100% carbon-free and can be used to create green electricity, substitute or complement natural gas and replace diesel or other gasoline for heavy-duty trucks, ships, and trains, said Laura L. Luce, Hy Stor Energy’s CEO.

In addition to regularly producing and delivering to customers across Mississippi and surrounding states, Hy Stor will house green hydrogen in caverns developed in Mississippi’s naturally occurring salt domes that can be stored for months and years at a time, Luce said.

That way, it can be used when needed, such as during extreme weather events, like hurricanes, when power can be out for days and weeks, she said. It can also be accessed at times when renewables like solar panels and wind turbines can’t produce energy.

“It’s difficult when you have an energy form that is only available when the sun is shining, and the wind is blowing,” Luce said. “If a company wants to decarbonize part of their energy profile, or if they want to go 100% clean energy, you really can’t do that right now on a 7 by 24 basis.”

“What we’re trying to do is take those hard to decarbonize sectors, like cement, or steel and data centers and be able to create energy, power, electricity, that’s 100% carbon-free,” she continued.

The project will extend from outside Jackson to deep water ports on the coast. Hy Stor Energy has received approval to store hydrogen in multiple Mississippi counties, including Smith, Perry and Simpson, and will likely expand.

Members of the board of supervisors from all three counties have penned letters of support for the project. In a Sept. 15 letter from the Perry County Board of supervisors urging the U.S. Department of Energy to approve a loan for the project, they said the environmental and economic impact the hub could bring are “sorely needed.”

“As part of his Justice40 Initiative, the President has pledged to allocate at least 40% of climate investments to disadvantaged communities,” they wrote. “There is no area more in need of these investments than the State of Mississippi, which has the highest percentage of African-Americans of any state in the country.”

Republican Gov. Tate Reeves, Speaker of the House Philip Gunn and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann have all voiced support for the project, along with the state’s three public service commissioners.

Luce said Mississippi was an ideal place to bring the project because of its proximity to existing infrastructure in the form of interstate gas transportation pipelines and electric transmission lines, as well as interstate highways, rail lines, deep water ports, and the Mississippi River.

Luce said the state’s naturally occurring underground salt formations can support the development of the large caverns needed to store years’ worth of green hydrogen, Luce said.

The planned scale of the Mississippi Clean Hydrogen Hub is up to 10 times larger than any other green hydrogen project under consideration in the U.S., Luce said.

It will create an estimated 110 million kilograms of green hydrogen annually when it opens for commercial service around 2025. If it’s 100% of that green hydrogen were used as fuel, it would be enough to fuel 25,000 medium to heavy-duty sized trucks or 600,000 cars.

When it opens, the Mississippi hub will have the capacity to store more than 70 million kilograms of green hydrogen in its underground salt caverns.

Green hydrogen is produced by splitting water into two parts – hydrogen and oxygen – via electrolysis that uses renewable electricity like sun and wind. Green hydrogen, when produced and burned, emits no carbon dioxide, only water vapor.

Hy Stor Energy is working with Connor, Clark & Lunn Infrastructure, a firm with a history of investing in and owning renewable energy projects.

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Mississippi’s capital city dumped more than 6 billion gallons (22.7 billion liters) of partly treated sewage into a river in 2020, seven years after signing a federal court agreement to clean up its act, court records show.

The records also show sewer overflows in Jackson released more than 523,000 gallons (nearly 2 million liters) of untreated waste into the environment last year, WLBT-TV reported.

The city had made “only limited progress” toward some requirements in a 2013 agreement with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and had not begun work toward other “crucial” goals, according to an August status report. Jackson has a deadline of late 2030 to meet terms of the consent decree, which was announced in November 2012 and became final in March 2013.

Jackson is negotiating with the EPA to amend the order, with EPA and the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality to assess the city’s financial condition and evaluate its proposed changes, the station reported.

The city, which agreed to spend about $400 million to comply with state and federal water laws, now will need nearly $960 million to do so, it said in the report.

The untreated sewage in 2020 came from 376 overflows throughout the collection system. Eleven forbidden bypasses at a wastewater treatment plant discharged partly treated wastewater into the Pearl River.

The system had more than 2,300 sewer overflows in the five years before the agreement, for an average of 460 a year.

But, about halfway into the 17.5-year agreement, the city “has not yet begun crucial elements of the consent decree” while other elements “remain significantly delayed,” the report states.

Under the current agreement, Jackson must evaluate and rehabilitate its wastewater collection and transmission system, as well as its Savanna plant and its main sewage line, called the West Bank Interceptor. The city also agreed to put together a plan to deal with overflows and a program to get businesses not to dump fats, oils, and grease into the sewers.

Most importantly, the report said, the city has not begun evaluating its wastewater collection and transmission system — two years past its deadline for doing so — or begun fixing the system.

Jackson has spent about $136 million to improve the sewer system and has made “timely” upgrades to the West Bank Interceptor, according to the report.

City attorneys said other work has been delayed by money troubles, including complications with its water billing system, the downgrading of Jackson’s bond rating in 2018, the declining income level of ratepayers, and the COVID-19 pandemic.

In addition, they noted, west Rankin County, which had paid millions of dollars a year for sewage treatment at the Savanna plant, recently began using its own treatment plant. The city says that will cut money available to Jackson’s system, according to court records.

A $90 million settlement in another case made $59.8 million available for the consent decree, but most was used for other obligations, attorneys wrote. “The city maintains that it was necessary to commit the majority of these funds to re-establish compliance with bond covenants, repay the city’s general fund, and repair the meter and billing system,” the report said.

The city also told the court it was expecting about $42 million in pandemic economic recovery money, some of which might go toward “critical water and wastewater funding needs.”

To date, the administration has spent $12.7 million on infrastructure, including $8 million to replace a 48-inch water main, $1.8 million for sewer evaluation, and $950,000 toward design and administration for projects at the city’s water treatment facilities.

Another $5.7 million in COVID-19 relief funds went to help cover police and firefighter pay raises, while the mayor hopes to allocate millions more to spur economic development.

An updated status report is due Oct. 29.

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — A planetarium in Mississippi’s capital city is undergoing renovations and is expected to reopen at the end of 2023 with a fresh look and more extensive exhibits.

This is the first renovation in decades at the Russell C. Davis Planetarium in downtown Jackson, the Clarion Ledger reported.

Mike Williams, the planetarium manager, said the city is creating a world-class center for science and technology.

“This is going to be something we can present to the world that is in diametrically opposed to a lot of the negative ideas people may have about our state,” Williams said.

Williams said visitors will see interactive exhibits, including some using augmented and virtual technology. Exhibits will showcase recent space missions and projects by NASA and space travel by private companies, he said.

He said he hopes new and updated exhibits will inspire students to explore Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics careers.

“It’s a total investment in our kids and the people of our state,” Williams said.