KRC Partners to Request the Abandonment of the Yazoo Pumps Project

On November 30, 2020, KRC joined with 122 other conservation, faith-based, social justice, and recreation organizations in requesting that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers permanently abandon efforts to build the environmentally devastating, extremely costly, highly controversial, and long-vetoed Yazoo Pumps project, which had been vetoed in 2008 by the Environmental Protection Agency because the project would cause “unacceptable damage” to “some of the richest wetland and aquatic resources in the nation.” 

 

Despite the veto of the project, which was upheld by federal courts, a recent Corps analysis recommends construction of the same pumping station that could increase flood risks for downstream communities and could result in the overtopping and possible collapse of the Yazoo Backwater Levee, causing catastrophic flooding for the very communities the Yazoo Pumps are purported to protect. 

 

The Yazoo Pumps would damage up to 200,000 acres of ecologically rich wetlands in the heart of the Mississippi River flyway, and failed to consider recommendations for a suite of proven, low-cost, natural and non-structural measures proposed by the conservation community, including moving people and property out of harm’s way and compensating farmers to restore cropland back to wetlands.