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Sierra Club blasts lack of need for Big Sunflower\Yazoo Pumps projects
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12, 2004

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has data that disproves the Army Corps of Engineers' claims that the Yazoo Pumps and Big Sunflower dredging projects are necessary for flood control in the Mississippi Delta

JACKSON – Mississippi Delta Sierra Club representative Honey Ussery and Mississippi Sierra Club Legislative Director Louie Miller led a press conference on April 14 to release FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) data that disproves the Corps claims that the Yazoo Pumps and Big Sunflower dredging projects are necessary for flood control in the Mississippi Delta.

The two projects combined are estimated to cost close to $300 million. Yet from 1979 to 2002, only 62 properties within the project area have filed National Flood Insurance Program claims

The FEMA data showed that over the past 24 years only $1.664 million has been requested in flood damages for the proposed project area. These figures reinforce the Sierra Club’s argument that the projects are unnecessary. In addition, it would take over 2,754 years to recoup the money it would take to build the Yazoo Pumps alone.

"To put this into perspective, if the Yazoo Pumps had been built the year Julius Caesar was murdered on the floor of the Roman Senate in 44 B.C., it would still be another 706 years from today before the flood damages in the project area would equal the cost of the pumps," Miller said.

Sierra Club and other environmental allies argue that the project aims to protect easily flooded land that should never have been cleared for farming. T. Logan Russell, president of the nonprofit Delta Land Trust, said the area would be more productive and provide residents with a better livelihood if used for timber and hunting.

Landowner John Wesley Jones, Jr., who owns 80 acres of land in the project area, expressed his concern over this fact and the impact the dredging would have on him personally.

"If they dredge, then I imagine my farmland will slough off into the river. There will be nothing left," Jones said.

American Rivers named Mississippi's Big Sunflower River the nation's Most Endangered River for 2003, citing the prospect that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers would drain 200,000 acres of floodplain wetlands and scour more than 100 miles of river bottom to enhance production of subsidized crops.

"I want you to know we are strongly opposed to this project," said U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist Kevin Sloan during the press conference.

Besides the harm to wetlands, studies have shown that dredging would re-suspend dangerous toxics such as DDT, which could increase concentration of poisons in the fish eaten by many subsistence fishermen in the Delta.