Nowhere is this more true than Jackson, Mississippi, where the levels of distrust, racial animus,

economic inequality, poor governance, partisan, politicking, and just general neglect of everyday

people is on display.

Welcome to The Lost Debate, a show for Politically Ecclectics. I'm Ravi Gupta.

And I'm Raki Schlott.

And today we have a little bit of a different show for you.

I'm coming to you from the New York studio and Ravi is down in Jackson, Mississippi, where

he is covering a water shortage crisis that's been pretty devastating. So

let's just go straight to that, Ravi. What are you seeing on the ground there? Well, about 180,000

residents of the city of Jackson are without potable water. And the background here is there's this

water treatment plant called the Obie Curtis water treatment plant, which serves the city, the entire city. And it had been relying on backup pumps for the past month. And there was a

flooding of the Pearl River, which is the river that cuts through Jackson, that destroyed the

backup pumps rendering the city without water. And for people who are new listeners, I ran a bunch of schools here,

charter schools. We started the first charter school in Mississippi, and now there are four here.

So I've spent a lot of time here. I used to split my time between Jackson and Nashville. And so I was

actually down in Pennsylvania for a reporting trip that I'll talk about later in this episode,

but I hopped on a plane

and came down here just to see what was going on and also to support our teachers and families.

And what I'm seeing down here, Ricky, are conditions that should not be present anywhere

and are shockingly present in the United States.

I would never think that I would see some of the things I'm seeing down here right now. Yeah, just reading from afar, it's terrible what's going on. It's the water is so bad that you can't drink it, you can't bat in it, you can't brush your teeth, you couldn't feed a pet with it if you wanted to. And so how are you seeing that people are getting by down there? What's the situation like?

I think like it's kind of a slow motion Katrina in a way that this has been going on for a long time.

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