A team of city building maintenance employees, senior high school students from St. Aloysius and volunteer Hinds County public works employees were expected to begin laying a 2-foot high sandbag wall around the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Depot on Levee Street.

The wall is expected to help protect the depot, which houses the Old Depot Museum and the offices of the Vicksburg Convention and Visitors Bureau and Vicksburg Main Street, from high water from a projected 52.5-foot crest on the Mississippi River expected here Jan. 15. the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is also providing a pump to remove water from the building’s basement.

The plan was one of the issues discussed by members of the city’s high water committee Tuesday afternoon.

“What we’re going to do is build an pyramid with six bags on the bottom and work up,” said city building maintenance supervisor Sammie Rainey. “We hope that will be enough. We should have 30 people working on that.”

Public Works Director Garnet Van Norman said the city will have 2,100 bags available for the work, and Warren County Emergency Management Director John Elfer said he would order an additional 10,000 bags as a supplement.

“If we don’t use them, we’ll either send them back or store them for next time,” he said.

James Harper with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Vicksburg District Emergency Managment team, said the wall would be built to the Corps standards, which recommend the bags not be fully filled and not tied, but folded under as they are placed.

Based on the requirements, he said, “You’re going to need every bag you’ve got to get it 2 feet high.”

In the southern part of the city in the Green Meadow area off U.S. 61 South, private businesses and industries are filling their own sand bags, plugging culverts in the area against potential flood water and getting employees to man pumps along the makeshift levee built during the 2011 flood on an abandoned railbed, Community Development Director Victor Grey-Lewis said.

In another matter, Police Chief Walter Armstrong said Washington Street will continue to be closed to trucks except for local delivery.

“We’re going to keep it closed, because the flood wall will block Levee Street by the depot,” he said.

Armstrong added the police department will also use ATVs to patrol around the flooded areas.