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By: Sarah Fowler, Yahoo! News
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.
It is enough water to serve the daily need of 50,000 people, or one-third of the city residents who rely on the beleaguered water utility.
No one knows for sure when the leak reached its current size. But newly appointed water officials say the city discovered the broken mainline pipe in 2016 and left it to gush, even as the water gouged out a swimming pool-size crater in the earth and city residents were forced to endure one drinking water crisis after another.
Jackson's water system has been flirting with collapse for decades thanks to a combination of mismanagement, crumbing infrastructure and a series of ill-fated decisions that cost the utility money that it did not have. In 2022, the Justice Department reached an agreement with the city requiring it to bring in an outside manager to run the water department.
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