EPA kills Corps pumps
Published 12:00 am Wednesday, September 3, 2008
A final decision by the Environmental Protection Agency’s senior water management official in Washington, D.C., has sounded the death knell for the $220 million pumping station proposed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for periodic south Delta flood relief, the most serious blow ever to the most recent incarnation of the 67-year-old Yazoo Backwater Project’s final component.
In a 74-page Final Determination report, Benjamin H. Grumbles, the EPA’s assistant administrator for water, invoked the agency’s statutory power to veto any project deemed too environmentally harmful.
It discusses how the pumps’ impact on keeping the 4,093-square-mile area, mostly farmland, from flooding would be harmful to wetlands and wildlife in the inside and outside the area.
The Corps’ Recommended Plan as developed and announced by the Vicksburg District of the Army Corps of Engineers would complete a design initiated after 1927 flooding. It would supplant the role of levees along the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers that keep the area dry from overland flooding by installing pumps at Steele Bayou to remove at least some of the water ponding inside the levees during severe and lengthy floods.
Grumbles said the plan “would dramatically alter the timing, and reduce the spatial extent, depth, frequency and duration of time project area wetlands flood,” adding the pumps would “significantly degrade” ecological functions for up to 67,000 acres of wetlands.
U.S. Sens. Thad Cochran and Roger Wicker had asked the EPA to hold off on its final report. Their specific position was that Congress had authorized the comprehensive Yazoo Backwater Project and the executive agency lacked authority to veto an act of Congress.
Under portions of the Clean Water Act in effect since 1979, the EPA can halt projects deemed harmful to natural resources. The specific section of the clean water legislation, 404(c), deals with the discharge of dredged or fill material at defined sites in U.S. waters and wetlands having a negative impact on one or more various resources. Leading up to stating the project’s inconsistency with 404(c), Grumbles also referred to the Corps’ evaluation of 24,000 acres of wetlands outside the area assessed for the project itself as being equally inadequate.
Online
Copies of the EPA’s Final Determination, the Corps’ Final Environmental Impact Statement and related documents can be viewed online at www.epa.gov/404c.
This week’s veto, expected since the agency’s Atlanta-based Region 4 recommended the move June 30, makes the 12th project stymied on such grounds since the first veto in 1990.
Grumbles commends staff at the Corps’ Vicksburg District for “years of commitment and effort” during the multiple revisions since the project’s authorization by Congress in 1941, most of which came after the Yazoo Backwater Levee was completed in 1978, and acknowledged pumps as a vital piece of flood control as a whole, but concluded “adverse impacts on wetlands and their associated fisheries and wildlife resources are unacceptable.”
Support for improved flood protection for those living and working in the Mississippi Delta was reiterated in the report, but also favored a recommendation by Gov. Haley Barbour to convene an intergovernmental working group to study alternatives to the pumps that satisfy both flood control and environmental goals. Such a renewed study should be supplemented by “an independent peer-review process to ensure a balanced analysis.”
The Corps’ Vicksburg District spokesman, Frank Worley, declined specific comment on the decision, saying all comments would come courtesy of the EPA.
Environmental groups opposed to the pumps throughout the current plans and during past Corps proposals, cheered the decision as a victory for wildlife preservation and for taxpayers.
“The Yazoo pumps were a bad idea from the start — bad for long-term flood control efforts, bad for water quality, bad for wildlife, and bad for the taxpayers who would get stuck with the bill,” said Brian Jackson of the Washington, D.C.-based Environmental Defense Fund in a statement. “EPA made the right decision in stopping the project.”
“The people of Mississippi can move ahead to other economic development opportunities to use the world-class resources of the Delta,” said George Sorvalis of the D.C.-based National Wildlife Federation.
Criticism from Mississippi lawmakers and other pump supporters of the EPA determination contrasted starkly with the jubilation of longtime pump opponents.
“This veto is extremely disappointing and represents an unfortunate step backward for Mississippi’s South Delta,” read a statement issued by Wicker. “By ignoring years of work between the Army Corps of Engineers, the EPA, and local officials, this decision denies a project that would provide much-needed flood control for the Mississippians who live with the uncertainty of flooding in the Yazoo Backwater area. It is unfortunate that the EPA refuses to see the benefit of a pump similar to those that helped protect New Orleans and other low-lying communities along the Mississippi River from flooding during Hurricane Gustav,” Wicker’s statement read.
Indeed, since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the Corps was allowed to install long-planned gates where New Orleans drainage canals flow into Lake Pontchartrain. During the weekend, those gates were closed, keeping water from backing up into the canals and into city streets and buildings. While they were closed, pumps moved out rainwater accumulating in the canals.
Wicker and Cochran argued the project should fall under exemptions for certain federal projects found elsewhere in the Clean Water Act. In a response to the letter about six weeks later, EPA officials cited a Council on Environmental Quality memo from 1980 outlining guidelines on how an environmental impact statement should be submitted, adding environmental studies for the 2007 version of the pumps and an earlier version in 1983 were not sent to Congress in a timely manner.
Peter Nimrod, chief engineer for the Mississippi Levee Board, sponsor supporting agency of the Yazoo Backwater Project, said doubts linger among board officials and Corps engineers whether those guidelines apply to the Corps or other federal agencies, terming the response “hogwash.”
Without the levees, the area was subjected to overland flooding. With them, it will be subjected to the ponding effect, proponents say, meaning millions of dollars have been spent on construction and maintenance in the region over the decades that — without the pumps — has a zero net effect because flooding is flooding, regardless of the source.
Although models and experience indicate the pumps would rarely be used, flooding this year along the lower Mississippi, the worst since 1973, saw stages in the impoundment area max out at 92.2 feet. The Corps estimated 344,000 acres of land went under water, with about a third of it being land cleared for farming. The Corps has estimated a completed and functional pump station would have kept 141,000 acres dry, including 78,000 acres of farmland.