Mississippi Today
Jackson gas explosions lead to federal probe, Rep. Thompson looking for answers
The National Transportation Safety Board opened an investigation last week into two natural gas-fueled explosions in Jackson that happened last month, one of which killed an older woman.
On Wednesday, Rep. Bennie Thompson released a statement asking for an in-person briefing to examine the cause of the two events, which happened within four days and within a mile of each other.
“The safety and well-being of our communities are paramount, and it is imperative that we take these incidents seriously,” Thompson said. “The potential risks posed by natural gas cannot be understated, and we must ensure that all necessary measures are in place to prevent such tragedies from occurring in the future.”
The NTSB, an independent federal investigative agency, is still looking into the incidents. Both homes, which are in the southwest corner of the city below Interstate 20, were using gas connections from Atmos Energy Corp.
According to the NTSB’s statement, its staff was already en route to the first scene when it found out about the second explosion.
“On January 24, 2024, about 8:14 a.m., a home explosion and fire occurred at 185 Bristol Blvd. in Jackson, Mississippi, resulting in one fatality and one injury,” the statement reads. “While the National Transportation Safety Board investigative team was traveling to the scene, the NTSB learned of a second home explosion and fire.”
The second explosion happened just a few bocks south on Shalimar Drive around 4 a.m. on Jan. 27, and caused a fire that spread to a neighboring home. There were no injuries or deaths from the second event, the NTSB said.
The person who died in the first explosion, according to local news reports from WLBT and others, was 82-year-old Clara Barbour.
The NTSB, which has yet to release a cause of the incidents, said that Atmos discovered two leaks near the sites of the explosions over a month before they occurred. The utility provider determined that the leaks, which it found on Nov. 11 and Dec. 1, respectively, were “nonhazardous.”Atmos didn’t repair either leak prior to the explosions, the NTSB said.
Once the agency analyzes evidence and determines a cause, it will compile a final report and then make safety recommendations. The NTSB “tries to complete an investigation within 12 to 24 months,” according to its website. The agency, however, does not have any enforcement power.
“The NTSB is not a regulatory agency and therefore does not have any enforcement authority,” said Keith Holloway, a public affairs officer with the agency. “NTSB will issue safety recommendations during or as part of its final report at the end of an investigation to prevent a similar accident from reoccurring. NTSB recommendations are not geared towards recommending legal or enforcement action.”
Earlier this week, WLBT reported, Central District Public Service Commissioner De’Keither Stamps and nonprofit Mississippi Move went to homes near the incidents to give out free gas and carbon monoxide detectors.
Atmos, which serves gas to 274,000 customers in Mississippi, issued the following statement on Thursday:
“The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has issued a preliminary report for the January incidents that occurred in Jackson, Miss. The report is available here. The NTSB report confirms that the investigation is ongoing and future activity will focus on causal factors. The safety of our customers, employees, and communities is Atmos Energy’s highest priority. We appreciate the NTSB’s investigative efforts and will continue to work with their team, the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, and the Mississippi Public Service Commission as the investigation continues.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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Mississippi Today
On this day in 1961
Nov. 22, 1961
Five Black students, made up of NAACP Youth Council members and two SNCC volunteers from Albany State College, were arrested after entering the white waiting room of the Trailways station in Albany, Georgia.
The council members bonded out of jail, but the SNCC volunteers, Bertha Gober and Blanton Hall declined bail and “chose to remain in jail over the holidays to dramatize their demand for justice,” according to SNCC Digital Gateway. The president of Albany State College expelled them.
Gober became one of SNCC’s Freedom Singers and wrote the song, “We’ll Never Turn Back,” after the 1961 killing of Herbert Lee in Mississippi. The tune became SNCC’s anthem.
After her release from jail, Gober joined other students, and police arrested her and other demonstrators. Back in the same jail, she sang to the police chief and mayor to open the cells, “I hear God’s children praying in jail, ‘Freedom, freedom, freedom.’”
Albany State suspended another student, Bernice Reagon, after she joined SNCC. She poured herself into the civil rights movement and later formed the Grammy-nominated a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock to educate and empower the audience and community.
“When I opened my mouth and began to sing, there was a force and power within myself I had never heard before,” a power she said she did not know she had.
Other members of the Freedom Singers included Cordell Reagon, Bernice Johnson, Dorothy Vallis, Rutha Harris, Bernard Lafayette and Charles Neblett. On the third anniversary of the sit-in movement in 1963, they performed at Carnegie Hall.
“This is a singing movement,” SNCC leader James Forman told a reporter. “The songs help. Without them, it would be ugly.”
Today, the Albany Civil Rights Institute houses exhibits on these protesters, Martin Luther King Jr. and others who joined the Albany Movement.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
IHL deletes the word ‘diversity’ from its policies
The governing board of Mississippi’s public universities voted Thursday to delete the word “diversity” from several policies, including a requirement that the board evaluate university presidents on campus diversity outcomes.
Though the Legislature has not passed a bill targeting diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in higher education, the Institutions of Higher Learning Board of Trustees approved the changes “in order to ensure continued compliance with state and federal law,” according to the board book.
The move comes on the heels of the re-election of former President Donald Trump and after several universities in Mississippi have renamed their diversity offices. Earlier this year, the IHL board approved changes to the University of Southern Mississippi’s mission and vision statements that removed the words “diverse” and “inclusiveness.”
In an email, John Sewell, IHL’s communications director, did not respond to several questions about the policy changes but wrote that the board’s goal was to “reinforce our commitment to ensuring students have access to the best education possible, supported by world-class faculty and staff.”
“The end goal is to support all students, and to make sure they graduate fully prepared to enter the workforce, hopefully in Mississippi,” Sewell added.
On Thursday, trustees approved the changes without discussion after a first reading by Harold Pizzetta, the associate commissioner for legal affairs and risk management. But Sewell wrote in an email that the board discussed the policy amendments in open session two months ago during its retreat in Meridian, more than an hour away from the board’s normal meeting location in Jackson.
IHL often uses these retreats, which unlike its regular board meetings aren’t livestreamed and are rarely attended by members of the public outside of the occasional reporter, to discuss potentially controversial policy changes.
Last year, the board had a spirited discussion about a policy change that would have increased its oversight of off-campus programs during its retreat at the White House Hotel in Biloxi. In 2022, during a retreat that also took place in Meridian, trustees discussed changing the board’s tenure policies. At both retreats, a Mississippi Today reporter was the only member of the public to witness the discussions.
The changes to IHL’s diversity policy echo a shift, particularly at colleges and universities in conservative states, from concepts like diversity in favor of “access” and “opportunity.” In higher education, the term “diversity, equity and inclusion” has traditionally referred to a range of efforts to comply with civil rights laws and foster a sense of on-campus belonging among minority populations.
But in recent years, conservative politicians have contended that DEI programs are wasteful spending and racist. A bill to ban state funding for DEI in Mississippi died earlier this year, but at least 10 other states have passed laws seeking to end or restrict such initiatives at state agencies, including publicly funded universities, according to ABC News.
In Mississippi, the word “diversity” first appeared in IHL’s policies in 1998. The diversity statement was adopted in 2005 and amended in 2013.
The board’s vote on Thursday turned the diversity statement, which was deleted in its entirety, into a “statement on higher education access and success” according to the board book.
“One of the strengths of Mississippi is the diversity of its people,” the diversity statement read. “This diversity enriches higher education and contributes to the capacity that our students develop for living in a multicultural and interdependent world.”
Significantly, the diversity statement required the IHL board to evaluate the university presidents and the higher learning commissioner on diversity outcomes.
The statement also included system-wide goals — some of which it is unclear if the board has achieved — to increase the enrollment and graduation rates of minority students, employ more underrepresented faculty, staff and administrators, and increase the use of minority-owned contractors and vendors.
Sewell did not respond to questions about if IHL has met those goals or if the board will continue to evaluate presidents on diversity outcomes.
In the new policy, those requirements were replaced with two paragraphs about the importance of respectful dialogue on campus and access to higher education for all Mississippians.
“We encourage all members of the academic community to engage in respectful, meaningful discourse with the aim of promoting critical thinking in the pursuit of knowledge, a deeper understanding of the human condition, and the development of character,” the new policy reads. “All students should be supported in their educational journey through programming and services designed to have a positive effect on their individual academic performance, retention, and graduation.”
Also excised was a policy that listed common characteristics of universities in Mississippi, including “a commitment to ethnic and gender diversity,” among others. Another policy on institutional scholarships was also edited to remove a clause that required such programs to “promote diversity.”
“IHL is committed to higher education access and success among all populations to assist the state of Mississippi in meeting its enrollment and degree completion goals, as well as building a highly-skilled workforce,” the institutional scholarship policy now reads.
The board also approved a change that requires the universities to review their institutional mission statements on an annual basis.
A policy on “planning principles” will continue to include the word “diverse,” and a policy that states the presidential search advisory committees will “be representative in terms of diversity” was left unchanged.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
Closed St. Dominic’s mental health beds to reopen in December under new management
The shuttered St. Dominic’s mental health unit will reopen under the management of a for-profit, Texas-based company next month.
Oceans Behavioral Hospital Jackson, a 77-bed facility, will provide inpatient behavioral health services to adults and seniors and add intensive outpatient treatment services next year.
“Jackson continuously ranks as one of the cities for our company that shows one of the greatest needs in terms of behavioral health,” Oceans Healthcare CEO Stuart Archer told Mississippi Today at a ribbon cutting ceremony at its location on St. Dominic’s campus Thursday. “…There’s been an outcry for high quality care.”
St. Dominic’s 83-bed mental health unit closed suddenly in June 2023, citing “substantial financial challenges.”
Merit Health Central, which operates a 71-bed psychiatric health hospital unit in Jackson, sued Oceans in March, arguing that the new hospital violated the law by using a workaround to avoid a State Health Department requirement that the hospital spend at least 17% of its gross patient revenue on indigent and charity care.
Without a required threshold for this care, Merit Health Central will shoulder the burden of treating more non-paying patients, the hospital in South Jackson argued.
The suit, which also names St. Dominic’s Hospital and the Mississippi Department of Health as defendants, awaits a ruling from Hinds County Chancery Court Judge Tametrice Hodges-Linzey next year.
The complaint does not bar Oceans from moving forward with its plans to reopen, said Archer.
Oceans operates two other mental health facilities in Mississippi and over 30 other locations in Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas.
“Oceans is very important to the Coast, to Tupelo, and it’s important right here in this building. It’s part of the state of Mississippi’s response to making sure people receive adequate mental health care in Mississippi,” said Lt. Governor Delbert Hosemann at the Nov. 21 ribbon cutting.
Some community leaders have been critical of the facility.
“Oceans plans to duplicate existing services available to insured patients while ignoring the underserved and indigent population in need,” wrote Hinds County Sheriff Tyree Jones in an Oct. 1 letter provided to Mississippi Today by Merit Health.
Massachusetts-based Webster Equity Partners, a private-equity firm with a number of investments in health care, bought Oceans in 2022. St. Dominic’s is owned by Louisiana-based Catholic nonprofit Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady Health System.
Oceans first filed a “certificate of need” application to reopen the St. Dominic’s mental health unit in October 2023.
Mississippi’s certificate of need law requires medical facilities to receive approval from the state before opening a new health care center to demonstrate there is a need for its services.
The Department of Health approved the application under the condition that the hospital spend at least 17% of its patient revenue on free or low-cost medical care for low-income individuals – far more than the two percent it proposed.
Oceans projected in its application that the hospital’s profit would equal $2.6 million in its third year, and it would spend $341,103 on charity care.
Merit Health contested the conditional approval, arguing that because its mental health unit provides 22% charity care, Oceans providing less would have a “significant adverse effect” on Merit by diverting more patients without insurance or unable to pay for care to its beds.
Oceans and St. Dominic’s also opposed the state’s charity care condition, arguing that 17% was an unreasonable figure.
But before a public hearing could be held on the matter, Oceans and St. Dominic’s filed for a “change of ownership,” bypassing the certificate of need process entirely. The state approved the application 11 days later.
Merit Health Central then sued Oceans, St. Dominic and the State Department of Health, seeking to nullify the change of ownership.
“The (change of ownership) filing and DOH approval … are nothing more than an ‘end run’ around CON law,” wrote Merit Health in the complaint.
Oceans, St. Dominic’s and the Mississippi Department of Health have filed motions to dismiss the case.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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