Key phrase: The project was supposed to include a pumping station to lift water from the closed-in area and release it the Mississippi River, but the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency rejected the pump as harmful to wetlands inside the closed-in area
These Oxbows cause all kinds of trouble. We had one in our area and some stupid little "special" fish got trapped in the bow and were breeding. In the meantime, the bow was cutting into a hill and a house was starting to fall off a cliff above the oxbow.
The solution was ridiculous and all to save the stupid little fish.
The patio part of the house did eventually fall.
We're the government and we're here to help!!
So weird to have a story like that, but no photos, in 2019.
***It’s another casualty in a backwater flood that’s the highest since 1973,***
“PAY NO ATTENTION TO THAT MAN BEHIND THE GREAT 1927 FLOOD CURTAIN!”
A pump isn't going to be harmful to wetlands unless it is used all the time, excessively, to keep them from being wetlands. Maybe what they meant, but did not want to say, was the presence of the means to turn wetlands into drylands would be a temptation that local politicians would easily succumb to, to get votes or to profit from unwise overdevelopment in low areas that should remain sloughs to catch runoff and prevent flooding. I used to live on the floodplain of the Mississippi- much of the problem wasn't that people lived there on he sand ridges but that developers were often politicians who would not leave the natural sloughs alone and they used the law to their advantage to get such land ha had once been se aside as protection for existing neighborhoods, and filled them in to get space to build more subdivisions, often even higher than the natural ridges that were inhabited because they were not flood prone. They also cut across sloughs with roadbeds that blocked the movement of water to and from the river, turning them into shallow lakes. When this movement of water was blocked, cattails would quickly begin the process of filling in the enclosed lakes and over time this also further reduced he amount of area to which runoff or rising water could be diverted.