In 2019, an unrelenting flood swamped more than half a million acres in the Mississippi Delta’s Yazoo Backwater. It destroyed nearly 700 homes, wiped out an entire planting season for some farms and took more than six months to recede.
People like Victoria Darden are still haunted by the disaster.
“There is a lot of trauma,” she said from her 900-acre farm about an hour outside of Vicskburg, Miss. “I don’t think I really knew what anxiety was before 2019. But now I definitely do.”
In January, Darden and other supporters of a massive infrastructure project got the news they’d been waiting years to hear.
Federal agencies, including the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Environmental Protection Agency, agreed to move forward with a pumping station that would suck 25,000 cubic feet of water per second out of the Yazoo Backwater.
This project goes all the way back to 1941, when Congress approved a flood-control plan that included pumps to drain an area that spans about 1,400 square miles.
Decades later, the pumps have never been built.
Under the current plan, the pumping station would turn on when floodwaters reached a threshold of 90 feet during the growing season.
“It would be life-changing for the whole community here,” Darden said.
The proposed pumps would not prevent smaller floods like the one that hit the area this spring. But they would stop the catastrophe of 2019 from happening again, said Mississippi Levee Board Chief Engineer Peter Nimrod.
“2019 was a game changer when people really saw the effects of backwater flooding,” he said, standing atop the Steele Bayou Drainage Structure near where the pumps would be built.
An area prone to floods
Floods have always scoured the Mississippi Delta, but the Yazoo Backwater can experience them for long periods of time.
A system of levees, along with the Steele Bayou Drainage Structure, is designed to prevent the nearby Mississippi River from inundating homes and farms in the backwater.
The large gate stays closed when the Mississippi reaches flood stage. However, if rain falls while the gate is down, that rain cannot drain out of the Yazoo Backwater. The gate “really is the plug at the bottom of the bathtub,” Nimrod said.
That’s why 2019 was so bad. The Mississippi River stayed high for months, and the gates never opened.
Big floods along the Mississippi have become more common. Experts who study the river say there are various reasons. Decades of engineering levees and dams have made flooding worse, according to researchers. Climate change contributes to the problem with more intense rainfall.
At the same time, drought has also plagued the Mississippi River in recent years.
Designing the pumping project for the Yazoo Backwater will take several years and while there is not yet an official price tag from the government, it’s likely to cost well over $1 billion, Nimrod said.
Environmental solution or a bailout for farmers?
The project is so large that environmental groups are eager to stop it.
Nestled between the farms of the Yazoo Backwater, the Delta National Forest is a refuge for wildlife. Alligators sun themselves on backcountry roads, and millions of migrating birds stop to feed in the swampy wetlands.
“What’s so unique about the Yazoo Backwater area is that it’s one of the last remaining wetland habitats still connected to the Mississippi River,” said Audubon Delta’s Jill Mastrototaro.
Mastrototaro and her allies have been fighting the pumps for years. In 2008, the Bush Administration’s EPA vetoed a similar proposal because of the impact it would have on the region’s wetlands. In the latest proposal, the pumps would be even bigger.
“They’re going to draw the water down artificially seven months of the year when wildlife need it the most. And all of that has cascading effects on the habitat, on the ecosystem, on the insects, on the plants, on the wildlife that depend on it,” Mastrototaro said.
By the government’s own estimate, the pumps would affect nearly 93,000 acres of wetlands. Sierra Club’s Louie Miller said the project will be “the end of hardwood bottom habitat in the South Delta.”
“The pumps are designed for ag drainage, masquerading as flood control to dupe people into believing this is the panacea for flooding in an area that’s going to flood regardless,” Miller added.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers didn’t respond to requests for an interview. But the plan does include voluntary buyouts that would return some low-lying farms to natural habitat.
It’s nowhere near enough to make up for the lost habitat, said Mastrotaro, “The numbers don’t add up.”
Meanwhile, a group of community members has also implored the EPA and the Corps of Engineers to address Yazoo Backwater flooding without a pump.
A 2022 letter to government agencies called the project “a false promise.” It said pumping would make flooding worse downstream for the poor, Black communities that have long suffered in flood-prone neighborhoods along the Mississippi.
“The Yazoo pumps are a blatant environmental injustice,” community leader Ty Pinkins wrote in another letter from 2023. Pinkins, who ran for U.S. Senate last year, said the money spent on pumps — “likely more than a billion” — would be “better spent on providing meaningful flood relief and economic opportunities to help redress the environmental and other injustices that plague the Yazoo Backwater.”
Opponents like Mastrototaro agree. Instead of pumps, environmental groups have called for the government to raise roads and homes, and turn much more low-elevation farmland back into wetlands.
‘Banking on the pumps’
These arguments don’t make sense to Anderson Jones, whose home in the Yazoo Backwater was destroyed in 2019.
His yard was buried knee-deep in black water. He patrolled the sandbag levee around his house with a rifle to keep the water moccasins away. It took more than five years and $90,000 to rebuild his childhood home.
Jones refuses to accept the claim that the pumps are just for farmers.
“I know what it’s like to flood,” said Jones, 65. “The water gets in your house and stays about five, six months and the mold gets every which way. Some people talk and they ain’t never been through nothing.”
Which is why he wants the pumping project finished. He’s “banking on the pumps and the Lord” to keep his home dry the next time the water rises to catastrophic levels.
“I am going to stay right here,” he said.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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