When the water in Jackson, Mississippi, shut off, Gwen Robinson and her daughters tried to cope by getting creative. They avoided using the bathroom as much as possible, and when they couldn’t hold it anymore, they stretched black trash bags across the toilet to capture waste and then poured in bleach. They boiled bottled water to cook, and they used baby wipes to clean their bodies. But on day five, Robinson, a single mother, faced the inevitable: She needed to shower to go to work, and that meant overdrafting her bank account by $500 to cover six nights in a hotel outside of town.