Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

I'm Joshua Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement,

and a former health commissioner here in Baltimore.

Our goal is to bring evidence and experience to illuminate critical public health issues.

If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to Public Health Question

at jh.hu.edu.

That's Public Health Question at jhu.edu for future podcast episodes.

Hi, I'm Lindsay Smith-Rogers, producer of Public Health on Call.

Today, how an expert looks around a city and assesses the likelihood of infrastructure failures.

Dr. Marcus Hendricks, a faculty member and director of the Stormwater Infrastructure, Res resilience, and justice lab at the University of

Maryland. speaks to Dr. Josh Sharfstein about Flint, Michigan and Jackson, Mississippi,

and the evolving pattern that they represent. Let's listen.

Dr. Marcus Hendricks, thanks so much for joining me in public health on call to talk about not just the

situation in Jackson, Mississippi, but what we can learn from this situation about the more

general challenges facing urban infrastructure.

Sure.

Thank you so much for having me.

So when Flint happened, often people may have thought that there was a

challenge in Flint, Michigan with the water. It was a Flint, Michigan issue. And now Jackson

has happened and people have said, well, there's a problem in Jackson, Mississippi with the water.

It's a Jackson issue. You think about water systems across the country.

How do you think about it? Sure, yeah. I think that we tend to focus on the headline story of the day,

...