A Mississippi flood relief project could harm 90,000 acres of valuable wetlands. Is it worth the tradeoff?

ROLLING FORK, MISS. — Anderson Jones first remembers his home flooding in 1973, when water from the nearby Mississippi River blanketed his family’s 10-acre farm and surrounded the shotgun house his father built, leaving it an island. The family tried to keep the water out, but when puddles started forming on the floor, a teenage Jones and his siblings were forced to evacuate.

“We was the only ones out here. Everybody had left,” recalled Jones, now 65 and still living in the same house in Issaquena County, Mississippi. “When the water started seeping in, and we couldn’t bring no equipment to try to patch it up, we had to go.”

Jones’ home sits on the western edge of the Yazoo Backwater area, a 1,446-square-mile basin in Mississippi’s Delta region once dominated by river swamps and floodplain forests. Crop fields have steadily replaced these wetlands over the years, but those that remain support hundreds of plant and animal species and serve as a rest stop for millions of migrating birds each year.

Jones’ family settled here in part because they could live off the rich land. His father was a forester, and he and his nine siblings grew up squirrel hunting and helping with the family farm. “I’m not gonna move,” said Jones. “I’m not gonna give up what my dad had worked hard for, no sir.”

While backwater wetlands depend on periodic flooding for survival, severe inundations in recent decades have decimated crops and pushed residents like Jones out of their homes, sometimes for months at a time. These floods have increased local support for a government project that would install a sprawling pumping station in the backwater area.

Developed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Yazoo Pumps project is meant to reduce flooding while protecting farmers and minimizing environmental harm. But conservation groups insist the project would disrupt the area’s delicate hydrology, damaging at least 90,000 acres of forested wetlands at a time when federal wetland protections are fraying.

Concerns over wetland degradation have stymied past versions of the Yazoo Pumps project. In 2008, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency used a rarely invoked authority to block construction of a smaller pumping station in the area.

The EPA’s about-face has dismayed environmentalists, who argue the Corps’ latest pumps plan is just as harmful to backwater wetlands and wildlife as its predecessors.

“I don’t see how the damage is less than before,” said Eugene Turner, a professor at Louisiana State University’s Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences specializing in wetland management and loss. “You’re not getting conservation of wetlands — you’re having a drainage of wetlands.”

The Yazoo Backwater area is part of the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley, an ancient floodplain flanking the Mississippi River that stretches from southern Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico (which President Donald Trump ordered be renamed the Gulf of America).

Once home to 24 million acres of wetlands fed by the river and its tributaries, the valley has lost most of these river swamps to agriculture, and the Corps has used levees and other diversions to shield farmers and crops from recurrent flooding.

The agency’s newly authorized Yazoo Pumps project seeks to address continued flooding in the backwater area caused, at least in part, by its own engineering.

To remove excess water from the area during times of high flow, the Corps plans to install a giant pumping station next to the floodgate, capable of moving 25,000 cubic feet of water per second. Though the station would run year-round, the Corps says its operating schedule will allow enough periodic flooding to sustain local wetlands while protecting homes and crops from the worst floods.

In all, the Corps estimates that about 780 homes in the backwater basin could see less flooding after the pumps are installed, including 309 homes in low-income communities burdened by environmental hazards.

Agency officials said the new plan will protect vulnerable residents while preserving the basin’s remaining natural resources.

“One of the misconceptions of this [project] is that the pumps are going to drain the entire Yazoo Backwater out … and that’s not the case,” said Brandon Davis, the environmental planning chief at the Corps’ Vicksburg District.

Environmental groups counter that the Corps’ new pump plan would inflict lasting damage on a stretch of backwater wetlands roughly double the size of Washington, D.C.

“Reducing water levels will reduce the productivity of the wetlands,” said Alex Kolker, an associate professor at the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium. “It’ll reduce the amount of food they can produce, which will reduce the amount of wildlife and birds that a system like that can support.”

Kolker also worries the pumps could impair other wetland functions, like their ability to store carbon from the atmosphere and filter out contaminants from water. He said despite the Corps’ efforts to reduce environmental harm, the plan would still result in the “degradation” of habitats and ecological processes.

“You’re still going to have drying out in some of these wetlands, and particularly in some of the swamps,” he said. “It does look like many of the concerns from the environmentalists are still there.”

Corps officials acknowledged that the pumping system could alter flood patterns across roughly 90,000 wetland acres in the backwater area. However, they stressed that these hydrologic changes could be slight in many cases and would not necessarily translate to damage.

Since the Corps cannot avoid harming federally protected wetlands with its approved Yazoo Pumps plan, the agency is legally required to offset the damage through compensatory mitigation — creating or restoring similar habitats to those destroyed.

Under the proposed arrangement, Ducks Unlimited would generate “mitigation credits” by restoring and building new wetlands in the Mississippi Delta. The Corps would then purchase those credits to offset damage from the pumps’ construction and operations, according to agency documents.

The Corps used a complex technical formula to determine the amount of mitigation required for the project. Based on those calculations, Ducks Unlimited confirmed that it will need to restore close to 6,000 acres of wetlands in the Yazoo basin — an area seven times the size of Central Park.

“This is probably one of the biggest wetland mitigation projects in the entire country,” said Patrick Raney, Ducks Unlimited’s director of conservation services.

The project’s scale is reflected in its price tag and expected timeframe: Based on previous restoration work, Ducks Unlimited expects mitigation for the Yazoo Pumps to cost around $90 million and take up to 12 years to complete.

Raney said his organization is equipped to execute the plan, which hinges on converting flood-prone farmland into new marshes.

Other environmental groups described the Corps’ mitigation strategy as unrealistic and insufficient, saying it doesn’t come close to compensating for damage to 90,000 acres of wetlands.

Erik Johnson, a conservation biologist and the director of conservation science at Audubon Delta, was skeptical that any mitigation plan could replace the distinct habitats and ecological benefits of the backwater area’s swamp forests.

“Some of this may, in fact, be unmitigable,” he said, explaining that it would take decades before restoration efforts could produce fully mature forested wetlands.

Davis, with the Corps, declined to confirm Ducks Unlimited’s cost estimate for the mitigation plan, saying it would be “premature” to speculate about cost. The agency has committed publicly to purchasing all necessary mitigation credits before starting construction.

Johnson and others’ warnings about the Yazoo Pumps plan echo concerns from government agencies over past versions of the project.

More than 15 years later, the Corps put forward a new plan that would allow for more seasonal flooding than the rejected 2007 scheme — a change the agency hoped would make the project more palatable to the EPA.

On Jan. 8, the EPA released a letter expressing support for the Corps’ new project, stating that it would be “less environmentally damaging” than the 2007 proposal.

Stu Gillespie, a supervising senior attorney at the environmental law group Earthjustice, called the EPA’s January determination unprecedented and illogical. By allowing the current Yazoo Pumps plan to move forward, the agency is violating standards clearly established in its own veto, he said.

“This proposed project is going to impact over 90,000 acres of wetlands. That’s three times the amount that EPA prohibited in the veto,” Gillespie said. “For them now to reverse course and say the veto doesn’t apply is unheard of.”

With the latest Yazoo Pumps plan now moving into its engineering and design phase, Gillespie did not rule out the possibility of litigation to force a judicial review of the EPA’s decision. Abandoning the veto and greenlighting the project dilutes the authority of the EPA and Clean Water Act, opening the door to further wetland conversion outside the Yazoo Backwater area, he said.

In Issaquena County, Anderson Jones said he hopes the approved Yazoo Pumps project will protect his ancestral home. The constant flooding has worn on him and his family, and he’s willing to try any solution that could offer some relief — even one that isn’t perfect.

“I’m trusting God that the pumps will work,” he said. “It can’t be no worser.”