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Smelling Sewage on Sage Street by Kayode Crown code 101A and describes the work: “ran cable toward street about 70 ft and ran into mud. (Indistinct) is only 30ft and couldn’t unstop line.” The Jackson Free Press reached out to Roto-rooter who confirmed that the Pittmans were their clients but declined to give further details of their work or specific reasons they concluded that the courtesy Jesse and Sarah Pittman
Jesse and Sarah Pittman have had to live with the smell of sewer for a long time. They call it racist that the City of Jackson hasn’t stepped up to help.
great-great-grandchildren, believes she should not have to live with the awful smell of sewage. They hired Roto-Rooter, a plumbing and drain service, to fix the problem. The receipt shows that the Pittmans paid $264.60 and got zero results, because Roto-Rooter found it is in the purview of the City of Jackson to fix. The receipt is dated May 18, 2020, for repair
problem is the local government’s responsibility. The Pittmans said someone came from the City and said the couple had to privately fix the problem but then came back saying sorry, the City does need to fix it. They showed the Jackson Free Press a name with the number 601-9601875 they wrote on the back of a book, as the person they reached out to in the
City of Jackson to get some relief. This reporter dialed the number, which was to the sewer-management department of the City of Jackson, and was directed to the utility manager and eventually to the constituent services division of the Office of the Mayor. After the Jackson Free press provided the Pittmans’ address asking for clarification, Constituent Services Manager Keyshia Sanders promised to report back, pledging that someone would go to the Pittmans’ home to fix the sewage problem. That was June 10. On June 11, this reporter called again, with the same promise repeated. The Pittmans say the City always promises to come the next day, but they do not show up. Jackson Free Press visited the family on June 19 and at that time, nothing had been done about their problem. The Pittmans own the three-bedroom, two-bathroom single-family residential house, where they want to live their old age with some ease, not imagining that they would be dealing with the smell of raw sewage regularly assailing their nostrils. Charging City with ‘Racism’ In all the 45 years she has lived in the house and raised her kids (now age 66, 64 and 62) and sending them to a school across the street, Sarah Pittman never had this problem. After trying their best to get the attention of the City of Jackson, the couple concluded that the lack of response was because they live on the “wrong” side of Jackson. Nothing, it appears, can change Sarah’s conviction that nothing she does will ever work to get the attention needed. The impression they have is that because they are in a poor neighborhood, the City “acts like you don’t exist,” she said. She believes the City would have acted within 24 hours if the problem was in a more affluent neighborhood. “If it is in a white area, it won’t take more than one day to get it fixed. If they have this problem, there is no way it wouldn’t have been fixed. That is the way I feel,” she said. “They won’t let it go for this long in the white neighborhood. I don’t think that is fair.”
The neighbors have started complaining, Sarah said, because of all the smell, and she had to explain to them that it is not her fault, but the City’s responsibility. “The one at the back is already complaining,” she said. “As long as it was not really hot, they could not smell it so bad because my husband was putting things on it. But now it is hot, and the smell is awful. I don’t know what else to do.” Her husband recently bought cleaning materials like bleach to pour on the sewer flowing beside their house to reduce the smell. “He bought $40 in cleaning stuff and poured it back there so that we can breathe better,” she said. That is, they are paying for the air that they breathe. “He went to Home Depot and got two bags of lime and sprinkled it all around the house. It’s powdery and keeps down some of the germs. He got about six different things to put out there,” Sarah Pittman said. Turn Up the AC or Not? Sarah Pittman retired 20 years ago, when she was 64, from her work for Bernard Clothing where she worked as a seamstress after 11 years. “Because of my back, I cannot sit for a long time,” she said, referring to a back injury. However, once a seamstress, always a seamstress. She is constantly sewing different clothes to keep busy as this reporter witnessed in her sitting room on two visits. The house has window air conditioners, which suck in the sewage smell from outside. So they have to compromise between getting cooled, which comes with smelling other people’s decomposing waste lying around your house, and suffering the heat of summer as the temperature gets into the 90s. “Once I turned the air conditioner in the bedroom on, I had to turn it off quickly,” she said. “Then it got so hot. When I woke up, I was soaking wet. The fan does not give much air. I put the fan on, but I could not turn the air back on because the smell was just too bad.” The website healthfully.com reports that breathing in raw sewage fumes is described as both unpleasant and physimore sewage, p 10
June 24 - July 7, 2020 • jfp.ms
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he smell hits you in the nose, as the scent of open sewer flows around Sarah Pittman’s house at 3151 Sage St., in Jackson, and it stays with you. Sarah and her husband, Jesse, have been dealing with the smell for about a year. Sarah Pittman, who is 84 and has three daughters, 14 grandchildren, 26 great-grandchildren and three
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