In July 2024, 75 people showed up to a meeting in Gore Springs, Mississippi, an unincorporated Delta community in Grenada County.

That kind of turnout reflects what months of showing up before any grant or fiber deployment makes possible. The Community Sustainability Team at Communities Unlimited (CU) had already been in Grenada County building relationships with local leaders, federal partners, and residents.

When the CU Broadband Team arrived through the USDA Broadband Technical Assistance Program, they weren’t strangers at that kickoff meeting. Grenada County Supervisor Jeff Johnson came to that event. So did Dr. Trina George, then serving as USDA State Director for Mississippi.

The community was ready. Then the crews started digging.

When Broadband Met Water

Installing fiber in rural Mississippi isn’t just a technology project. In Gore Springs, it became an infrastructure emergency.

As crews laid conduit, they hit water lines. Over and over. The old Bogue Basin system, which had served Gore Springs and nearby Pleasant Grove before being absorbed into the City of Grenada’s water network, had never been fully mapped into a digital system. Radio-read meters installed across the system in 2014 had no GPS coordinates attached. Many hadn’t been physically located since.

For residents, that meant weeks and months of outages, pressure surges, and damage.

“It was so many water breaks that people started saying they didn’t even care if they had internet,” Johnson said. “The City of Grenada spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, several breaks every day, in overtime and parts fixing water lines.”

Verna Tillman felt it in her own home. A retired volunteer and the most consistent voice on the Gore Springs broadband committee, Tillman had stayed engaged through the whole process, even getting her house added to the national coverage map after discovering it wasn’t there at all. When the line breaks started, she watched her neighborhood lose water again and again.

“They hit the water lines many, many times,” she said. “The pressure did break a line and my whole house flooded. Had to replace all of the flooring.”

She’d been waiting for broadband long before construction started. Gore Springs sits in a dead zone, surrounded by large timber company landholdings that stretch for miles between households. The area’s sparse layout meant it had been written off for years.

“I was told 40 years ago that as long as there were not at least six houses within one and a half square miles, we would be limited in any kind of services,” Tillman said. “That’s proven to be true.”

For Tillman, having better internet is crucial to day-to-day activities, especially when family from out-of-town visits. Her eight-year-old granddaughter visits from Starkville as Verna’s youngest daughter works on her PhD at Mississippi State. When Verna’s granddaughter visits, she can’t connect her iPad. Neighbors who could work from home can’t. People dealing with illness who are told to stay home can’t do their jobs on the available service.

“It takes you one and a half times as long to complete stuff because the internet is so slow,” she said.

Building the Map That Never Existed

CU’s Geographic Information System (GIS) Project Manager Don Becker and Broadband Interstate Coordinator Mark Pearson moved fast. Within a week of the water issues surfacing, Becker was in the field. USDA grant funds covered the mapping work within scope, and CU started building a picture of the system that had never existed in digital form.

The second mapping pass, in October 2025, was where things came together. Johnson, though Grenada County holds no formal responsibility for the city-owned water system, activated his Precinct 3 road crew because these were his constituents.

“I got with Mark and a couple guys from his team, and we rolled together for a couple days mapping our stuff,” Johnson said. “They were very knowledgeable. Now when we have water breaks, they can get it fixed a whole lot faster. We don’t have to wait 24 hours anymore.”

Two retired Bogue Basin meter readers came out and filled gaps no database could. When digital records ran out, they pointed into the pines: “Back in those trees, about 20 feet. That’s where that meter is.”

Staff walked in and GPS-located meters that hadn’t been seen in over a decade.

Residents responded to door hangers by marking hidden meters with buckets and flower pots. CU’s GIS Team combined all of it, field tools, institutional memory, community knowledge, and engineering drawings, into a map city staff could use.

A Relationship Grows

Dr. George had moved from her USDA role to lead the City of Grenada in February 2025. When Pearson met with her to walk through what the USDA grant had covered and what remained, the city saw an opening. Grenada applied to the Delta Regional Authority (DRA) and received a grant to fund expanded GIS mapping across its remaining water systems. That project was approved at the Grenada City Council’s April 2026 meeting.

The scope is significantly larger. Rather than a single system in one community, CU’s GIS Team will document infrastructure across six water systems covering Grenada County: the City of Grenada, Grenada-Bogue Basin/Holcomb, Grenada County Water and Sewer Girl Scout, Grenada Industrial Park and Airport Water, Grenada County Water and Sewer Mondy Rd/Elliot, and Gore Springs itself.

As part of that work, the GIS Team will train Grenada utility staff directly, working alongside them in the field so city crews can maintain and build on the data themselves. When complete, the city will receive a comprehensive digital mapping system, printed wall maps, and portable field maps.

The project date has not been set yet, but Dr. George already knows how helpful the product will be once it’s complete.

“Having more accurate information on our water infrastructure will identify issues faster, improve maintenance planning, support future upgrades, and provide better service to our residents,” George said.

The stakes go beyond faster repairs. Across rural America, fiber installation is accelerating. Without accurate utility maps, construction crews hit buried lines, trigger outages, and run up costs that can delay or derail entire broadband projects. Getting the map right before crews get in the ground protects both.

Still Waiting on the Wire

The conduit is in the ground in Tillman’s part of Gore Springs. The fiber is not.

AT&T Mississippi received a preliminary Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) award to bring high-speed internet to this area. CU supported the state’s challenge process, the competitive review that required providers and advocates to verify every home and business on coverage maps, to make sure no location in the area was left without a provider applying to serve it.

Here’s where things stand: Broadband Expansion and Accessibility of Mississippi (BEAM) ran a competitive process for federal funding to connect all unserved and underserved locations. The federal government approved Mississippi’s plan in February 2026, and the state is moving toward finalizing agreements with internet providers so construction can begin.

Tillman is patient, but clear about what’s at stake.

“I hope that whatever service comes through will have a cost that’s not exorbitant, where people on fixed income can use it effectively and not be lacking somewhere else.”

Johnson put it candidly:

CU has folded Gore Springs into broader conversations about digital literacy ahead of when connectivity arrives. Getting fiber in the ground is only part of the equation. The Broadband Team knows that residents, especially seniors, also need the skills and confidence to use it safely and effectively once it’s there.

That means resources on avoiding scams, navigating online services, and accessing things like telehealth, job applications, and banking from home. Without that foundation, having internet access doesn’t automatically mean being able to take advantage of it.

That kind of thinking, building toward what comes after the wire, is what George and Johnson keep coming back to.

“Having CU’s support has been extremely valuable,” George said. “Their partnership has helped position Grenada for growth while giving us resources and expertise that strengthen our ability to serve citizens effectively.”

Johnson is just as direct.

“We appreciate Communities Unlimited. We love them. We give them five stars.”