Citizen groups question Governor Barbour’s recent statements on Vicksburg area flooding
For more information:
T. Logan Russell
Delta Land Trust
(601) 259-4789 tlogan@deltalandtrust.org
Governor Haley Barbour toured Vicksburg area flooding on Tuesday and suggested that the approximately 150 residents affected by Mississippi River flooding there could expect little or no taxpayer help in rebuilding their homes.
If people choose to live somewhere that they know repeatedly floods, at some point, it’s not the taxpayer’s responsibility anymore. We can’t expect the taxpayers just to continue to bail people out year in and year out,” Barbour said.
Yet despite his apparent support for taxpayer rights and non-structural approaches to flood control when it comes to repetitive flooding in the Vicksburg area, Barbour went on to defend construction of the planned Yazoo Backwater Pumping Plant in the extremely flood prone South Mississippi Delta.
There is considerable farmland and lots of houses underwater in the Backwater Area,” the Governor said. “We need the Yazoo Pumps but the environmentalists have stopped them for the last 20 years,” Barbour added.
Representatives of the Mississippi Wildlife Federation, Mississippi Sierra Club and Delta Land Trust took issue with the Governor’s statements.
The farmland in the Yazoo Backwater Area has a 50% chance of flooding every year,” said Dr. Cathy Shropshire, Executive Director of the Mississippi Wildlife Federation. “If that isn’t repetitive flooding, what is? It makes a lot more sense to continue the efforts to reforest this land through the Wetland Reserve Program and other programs than to build massively wasteful and environmentally destructive Pumps that will only make flooding in Vicksburg worse,” she added. “The money could be used to move people in the Yazoo Backwater Area out of harms way just like the Governor has proposed for the Vicksburg area,” she concluded.
As for flooding of houses in the Yazoo Backwater Area, Delta Land Trust’s T. Logan Russell, a seventh generation Mississippian with deep family ties to the Delta, survivor of the Easter Flood of 1979 and long time opponent of the Yazoo Pumps Project, took issue with the Governor’s statement.
The same day the Governor was grousing about residential flooding in the Yazoo Backwater Area, the Chief Engineer for the Mississippi Levee Board was saying that everything looked great on the protected side of the levee,” Russell said. “The current level of flooding in the Yazoo Backwater Area at the Steele Bayou gate is 91 feet. 91 feet is in the two-year floodplain. Corps of Engineers and FEMA data has revealed that there are virtually no primary residences in the two-year floodplain of the Yazoo Backwater Area,“ Russell continued. “I don’t know where the Governor got the idea that there were a lot of homes flooded in the Yazoo Backwater Area at 91 feet but that just isn’t the case. There may be a few hunting camps flooded in the Yazoo Backwater Area right now, but few, if any, primary residences are flooded,” he concluded.
Louie Miller of the Mississippi Sierra Club then stated, “Perhaps the Governor is not aware that the federal Office of Management and Budget killed the Pumps Project in 1989 before Senator Thad Cochran’s attempt to bring home the bacon one more time with a last minute, one sentence amendment to a 14,000 page spending bill revived the Pumps in 1996,” said Miller. “Last time I checked, the OMB is not generally known as an environmentalist organization,” he added.
Miller went on to say that, “In fact, all presidents since Reagan have been against the Yazoo Pumps. What Presidents Reagan, Bush I, Clinton and Bush II have all recognized is that the Yazoo Pumps are a colossal waste of taxpayer money that will only benefit 50 or so Delta farmers whom are already significant beneficiaries of federal commodity support programs. The Pumps are another in a long example of wasteful government spending that would benefit the Delta elites while ignoring the plight of the Delta’s poor,” Miller concluded.
The citizens groups encouraged interested Americans to email EPA in support of its proposed veto of the Yazoo Pumps at ow-docket@epa.mail.epa.gov with docket #EPA-RO4-OW-2008-0179 as the email subject. EPA is accepting comments until May 5.