Good Mornin’! Good Mornin’!
Build it and they will come. Finish the pumps and folks can live a normal life. In 1941, the Flood Control Act authorized the Yazoo Backwater Project to protect the Delta area of Mississippi from flooding. This project included a combination of levees, drainage structures and pumps. The pumps are the last remaining unconstructed feature of the Yazoo Backwater Project.
Why?
Conservationists from around the United States argue that the pumps will destroy the wetlands. What do you think continual flooding will do? The first pump schematics, which took up until 1986, were designed to actually turn on when the flood stage hit 80 feet and would pump out 17,500 cubic feet per second. That’s 135,000 acres of woods and wetlands that are flooded.
Upper Mississippi River Basin director for American Rivers Olivia Dorothy is quoted in a news release that “The pumps could push billions of gallons of water a day into the Yazoo River when it’s at flood stage, and that could hurt Black communities near Vicksburg. This massive amount of extra water could also breach the Yazoo Backwater Levee, flooding the very same communities that the pumps are supposed to protect.”
No, Olivia. It doesn’t work that way.
When the Mississippi Levee board folks that know the math actually do the math, 14,000 cubic feet per second in a two million cubic feet per second river won’t add ¼ inch of water at Vicksburg. The 14,000 figure is from the compromise that was designed to bring the conservationists back to the table. The pumps would turn on at 87 feet and over 200,000 acres would already be flooded. How does that even make sense? Let’s turn on a tiny pump after we’ve got farmers, businesses and highways already a few feet under water. I’ve always heard an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Makes sense to me.
The Corps of Engineers has actually built a scale model of the pumps project to study it. The model was required to accurately answer some of the questions and challenges that were required during design and plan development. It can also be used after the pumping station is built to solve potential hydraulic and engineering problems.
Read about it here: https://avionicsforum.com/usace-and-erdc-build-model-of-yazoo-backwater…
Here's a little levee board history. In 1997, knowing that an attack was looming from the environmental community, the Corps of Engineers employed a professional facilitator and invited both flood control and environmental interests, along with state and federal agencies, county supervisors and local landowners, to a series of meetings in an attempt to reach an agreement for a project that would balance economics, flood control and environment interests. The facilitation resulted in a wide range of additional alternatives (over 30) for the Corps to evaluate, including structural (pump and levee), nonstructural alternatives and combinations of both.
In March of 1999 after meeting with the deputy regional director of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, the Mississippi Levee Board initiated a series of consensus meetings with a large variety of organizations in an attempt to find a functional solution that would provide flood control with environmental benefits to the South Delta.
Organizations that participated throughout the Consensus Building Process included: Corps of Engineers; county officials; Delta Council; Delta Wildlife & Forestry; Ducks Unlimited; Environmental Protection Agency; Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality; Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries & Parks; Mississippi Levee Board; Natural Resource Conservation Service; South Delta Flood Control Committee; U.S. Fish & Wildlife; and the U.S. Forest Service.
Five private environmental groups withdrew from the consensus process after the first meeting:
Audubon Society
Gulf Restoration Network
Mississippi Wildlife Federation
National Wildlife Federation
Sierra Club
The Levee Board has kept inviting and providing copies of the minutes of the meetings in an effort to keep them involved in the process. They still don’t come. They all say something should be done. The five above agencies mentioned “raising highways and houses.” Just how high? And what are the people who live in those raised houses going to do for work when the towns and farms are all under water?
Folks, call your congressman, call your senators, heck, even call the White House and tell them to #finishthepumps. Call those agencies above and ask them to explain themselves. That’s what I’m working on. I’ll let you know what I find out.
