Texas’ experience of last month’s deadly winter storm may have grabbed headlines, but its neighbors fared just as badly. Two weeks after the storm first touched Mississippi — and one week after the state’s governor announced that he would “restore clean water” — thousands of residents in the capital city, Jackson, are still without water.

Some parts of the state were as cold as 20 degrees F, the coldest recorded temperature in Mississippi history. Hundreds of thousands of state residents suffered power outages, unheated homes, and water shutoffs as pipes froze, water treatment sites lost power and leaked, and energy providers failed to meet demand.

Governor Tate Reeves blamed the state’s difficulties on aging infrastructure, including poor building insulation and an outdated water system. The water system problems, he said in a press conference, date back to “50 years of negligence and ignoring the challenges of the pipes and the system.”

“Everyone should be looking at the South right now, especially communities of color in the South, to see what climate change is doing and going to continue doing in America,” Candace Abdul-Tawwab, assistant director of the Jackson-based People’s Advocacy Institute, told Grist. “These issues existed long before the winter storm and the attention focused on Texas.”

Read the full article about Mississippi's winter storm by Adam Mahoney at Grist.