Citizen’s Groups Express Concern Over Governor’s Misrepresentations about Yazoo Pumps
For more information:
Louie Miller
Mississippi Sierra Club
(601) 624-3503
lmillersc@earthlink.net
Several Mississippi citizen’s groups met at the State Capitol today to question Governor Barbour’s recent statements on flooding in the proposed Yazoo Pumps area. The groups referenced recent comments made by the Governor and by Neely Carlton, spokesperson for the Governor.
“There is considerable farmland and lots of houses underwater in the proposed Yazoo Pumps area,” the Governor said last week. “We need the Yazoo Pumps but the environmentalists have stopped them for the last 20 years,” Barbour added.
The citizen’s groups noted that there is no residential flooding in the proposed Yazoo Pumps area and that most of the flooding was on timberland and low lying marginal farmland.
“Last week the Governor said that there was considerable farmland and lots of houses underwater in the proposed Yazoo Pumps area, yet his disaster declaration request to FEMA did not include the counties in the proposed Yazoo Pumps area,” said Louie Miller, State Director for the Mississippi Sierra Club. “Either there is flooding in the proposed Yazoo Pumps area or there isn’t. If there is, why didn’t the Governor include these counties in the disaster declaration request? The Governor is talking out of both sides of his mouth and the people of Mississippi and the American people should be outraged about it,” Miller stated.
Miller added “This type of deception is nothing new for supporters of the Yazoo Pumps. This project has a long history of lies and propaganda manufactured by Pumps supporters ranging from the Corps of Engineers on down which is one of the reasons why the Office of Management and Budget, not generally known as an environmentalist organization, killed the project back in 1989 until Thad Cochran revived it with some legislative slight of hand in 1996,” Miller said. “To add insult to injury, with Cochran’s help, the rich farmers whom would benefit from this monumental boondoggle finagled a way to make sure that it was 100% federally funded with no local cost share,” Miller concluded.
The groups also referenced statements made last week by Peter Nimrod, Chief Engineer of the levee board in Greenville and by Kent Parrish, Project Engineer for the Yazoo Pumps.
“The same day that the Governor is grousing about flooding in the proposed Pumps Area, Peter Nimrod, the Chief Engineer of the Mississippi Levee Board in Greenville, said that while there was considerable flooding on the Mississippi River side of the levee, everything looked great on the proposed Pumps side,” said T. Logan Russell, Executive Director of Delta Land Trust based in Madison.
“A week later, Kent Parrish of the Corps Vicksburg District said that with an additional foot or two of water at the Steele Bayou gauge, you would actually begin picking up some residential flooding in the proposed Pumps area,” Russell added. “That means there is no residential flooding in the proposed Pumps area currently as evidenced by the Governor’s current FEMA disaster declaration request and historic FEMA flood damage data,” he continued. “The Governor even had his spokesperson, Neely Carlton, go on record before a federal agency saying that the flooding at the Governor’s lake house somehow would have been alleviated by the Yazoo Pumps. But the Governor’s house is not in the Yazoo Pumps area and probably would have flooded worse if the Yazoo Pumps were in operation,” Russell concluded.
Russell also referenced statements made by the Government Accountability Office. In 2006, the GAO told Congress that recent Corps of Engineers studies were so flawed that they could “not provide a reasonable basis for decision-making”. The GAO said that those studies, like the one for the Yazoo Pumps, were “fraught with errors, mistakes, miscalculations, and used invalid assumptions and outdated data,” Russell said. “This is one of many reasons why every American president from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush- Democrats and Republicans alike- has opposed the Yazoo Pumps project,” Russell concluded.
The groups also noted the Governor’s double standard between Mississippi River flooding and proposed Pumps area flooding. “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 last week.
Yet despite his apparent support for taxpayer rights and relocating flood prone residences when it comes to repetitive flooding in the Vicksburg area, Barbour went on to defend construction of the planned Yazoo Pumps in the extremely flood prone South Mississippi Delta.
“Any land that is currently flooded in the proposed Yazoo Pumps project area has a 50% chance of flooding every year,” said Dr. Cathy Shropshire, Executive Director of the Mississippi Wildlife Federation. “That sounds like repetitive flooding to me. 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 the Vicksburg area worse,” she added. “The money could be better used to move people in the proposed Yazoo Pumps area out of harms way just like the Governor has proposed for the Vicksburg area,” she concluded.
The citizens groups encouraged interested Mississippians and concerned 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.