The Army Corps of Engineers approved a massive water pumping project in the flood-prone Mississippi Delta on Thursday, a move likely to spur lawsuits over potential harms to tens of thousands of acres of wetlands.
The agency’s approval of the Yazoo Pumps project comes less than four years after the Biden administration effectively blocked the project, whose history dates back to a 1941 congressional authorization. Its main component is a 25,000 cubic-feet-per-second pumping station to help reduce floods that are common across a huge swath of the Delta, including highly productive farmland.
Supported by Mississippi politicians and agricultural groups, the project was vetoed by the George W. Bush administration due to “unacceptable adverse effects on fishery areas and wildlife.” During President-elect Donald Trump’s first term, the project was revived — despite concerns raised by EPA scientists.
The Biden administration initially held that EPA’s veto of the project in 2008 barred the Army Corps from continuing to pursue it. But after years of additional study by the Army Corps, EPA and the Fish and Wildlife Service, the project is ready to move forward, agency officials announced Friday.
“Reaching this milestone is a testament to the technical expertise, dedication, and collaboration of our team,” Col. Jeremiah Gipson, commander of the USACE Vicksburg District, said in a news release. “This record of decision reflects our shared commitment to serving the Yazoo Backwater community and to finding solutions to a longstanding issue that has affected our Mississippi Delta communities for decades.”
The Army Corps is now working on the design and “pre-construction” phase of the project, officials said. EPA, meanwhile, indicated in a letter this month that it expects to see action to “offset the project’s unavoidable impacts to wetlands and other aquatic resources, as well as fish and wildlife species.”
“The EPA appreciates the collaborative process pursued by the Corps in the development of the 2024 Plan, which we anticipate will provide significant flood risk reduction in the lower Mississippi Delta while avoiding, minimizing and effectively compensating for impacts to the region’s important ecological resources,” Bruno Pigott, the outgoing EPA acting assistant administrator for water, wrote in the letter to the Army Corps.
Environmental advocates said there are still major unanswered questions about the project, including the total cost to taxpayers.
The Army Corps’ final environmental impact statement from November did not include an estimate of total benefits and costs. Christi Kilroy, chief of public affairs for the agency’s Vicksburg district, said the costs would be determined “as the pre-construction engineering and design, and mitigation phases progress.”
Conservation groups estimate that about 90,000 acres of wetlands would be altered by the project. That’s roughly three times more than the acres of wetlands that would’ve been harmed under the earlier iteration vetoed by EPA under Bush.
The Army Corps could have pursued nature-based solutions to flooding instead, which might be more effective and less expensive, said Louie Miller, director of the Mississippi chapter of the Sierra Club.
He described the new version of the project as “exponentially worse” than earlier proposals.
“It’s a 1941 [agricultural] drainage project,” Miller said. “That’s the driver in this, big ag, and it always has been.”
The Army Corps will take steps to “support and maintain wetland functions” as it carries out the project, Kilroy said.
Mississippi’s congressional delegation will likely welcome the project’s approval. In November, after the Army Corps released its final environmental impact statement, Sens. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) and Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.) said the project would go a long way toward preventing future floods.
After heavy rain in 2019, the region experienced severe river backwater flooding, which lasted for about six months in some places. More than 750 homes flooded, and the event cost hundreds of millions of dollars in damages, the Army Corps has estimated.
“With the Corps, EPA, and Fish and Wildlife Service all on the same page, we are closer to construction than we’ve been in a very long time,” Hyde-Smith said in a statement in November. “I strongly encourage those living in the Delta and elsewhere in Mississippi to push these federal agencies to finish the pumps.”
Given the project’s long history, one question is whether it is still the best solution to the region’s flooding in light of climate change, said Patrick Parenteau, a professor emeritus at Vermont Law School. As it was originally designed, the project might have been the largest singular driver of wetlands loss in U.S. history, Parenteau said.
“You wonder whether these kinds of structural approaches make sense in an era of climate change,” he said. “What are [they] assuming are the future conditions with regard to climate-induced extreme weather, and has this project been designed to deal with them or not?”