Mike, you've been covering this since last year. What are the latest developments in this story?
Congress mandated in 2020 that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers study better ways to manage the lower Mississippi River, and essentially through Congress and through Mississippi's Congressional Delegation, they asked the Corps to study if there's a better way to control flood waters on the Mississippi via the Bonnet Carré Spillway without harming the Mississippi Sound, exclusively.
What Mississippians along the Mississippi Coast are asking, essentially, is just to have more of a say in the process. What that looks like is a coalition of local governments, fishermen and tourism industry members [who] have all gathered together to form the Mississippi Sound Coalition. Since 2019, they’ve filed two federal lawsuits relating to the damage from the openings. One of them was recently dismissed in the Southern District Court in Mississippi. The judge said that the coalition didn't have legal standing to sue the Army Corps of Engineers because they couldn't prove any imminent harm.
Now that that's been dismissed, the coalition is still looking at further options. I think, now, they're all waiting to see what this first update in the study will have to say.
It seems like multiple entities on the Mississippi Gulf Coast want to have more of a stake in how and when the spillway is operated.
Right. So the Mississippi Sound Coalition, as it's titled, is a really broad representation of different business, cultural and local government interests on the coast. There are county governments there. The Board of Supervisors of all three Coastal Mississippi counties are a part of the coalition. Certain local municipal governments, such as Pass Christian and Bay St. Louis, are also involved.
Then you have longtime members of the Mississippi Tourism Board. I believe a third of the state's tourism revenue every year comes from the Mississippi Coast, and it's basically just a tourism center for the South at large. There are also just commercial fishermen who work for larger companies and independent fishermen who are a part of it as well. They've all gathered together because they recognize that it's a symbiotic economy down there. Seafood is a key industry that affects jobs. It affects tax revenue. It affects tourism.
They're all working together with that symbiotic relationship in mind to try and achieve at least gaining some agency in the process of operating the spillway, because they feel not only that their needs are not only not being met, but that their voice is not even considered.
When you're talking about the impacts on the tourism industry, you're also talking about the damaging effects on the seafood industry, like the independent fishermen who depend on this for their livelihoods.
Yeah. Mississippi State University Extension Service, which is very involved in researching and analyzing agriculture and the agricultural economy, was commissioned by Harrison County to do a study of the impacts of the 2019 spillway openings on Coastal Mississippi and key economic impacts on the seafood industry. They estimated in 2019 alone that roughly $10 million in landings — which is a way to say seafood and sea products that they actually brought on board and caught — were lost in that year alone just from the spillway openings. More than 300 jobs, over $5 million in wages and a grand total for the region of an estimated loss of $12 million in sales just for seafood just from that year. That's from an economic study.
A more on-the-ground perspective than I've had from reporting in these coastal communities is that Mississippi historically had some of the largest oyster reefs in the world. It's the first industry on the coast, and Mississippi is known for its oysters. It's known for its shrimp. It's known for its crab, to some extent. Not a single oyster has been harvested in Mississippi waters since 2018 because of the 2019 Bonnet Carré Spillway openings.
Now these fishermen, some of whom are independent, have to contract with companies and private oyster holdings on the western coast of Louisiana and essentially pay them not only to harvest those oysters and plant those oysters but to bring them by boat all the way to coastal Mississippi.
I think of the larger, cultural identity of coastal Mississippi; you have several multigenerational fishermen, and they're looking at something that has supported their family and their livelihood sometimes for seven or eight generations. It's now their turn to run this company and to do the work, and they just can't because there are no oysters.
If you go to the Pass Christian City Hall, throughout the halls and the building there are framed black and white pictures, very old, of oystermen and oyster catches and different equipment used to harvest them throughout that city hall. These are historical photographs that, to a visitor, establish the history of the cultural tradition of this area. The plain fact of it is that not a single oyster has been harvested since 2018 in that region.
Ultimately, the Spillway’s purpose is so that the city of New Orleans isn't flooded, but on the other hand, the Mississippi Gulf Coast can't sustain as much water as was released. What are the effects of that?
To use a tired cliche, it's a very big rock and a very hard place that these two states and these communities find themselves between. The spillway was built after the great flood of 1927 when the Corps of Engineers was federalized to undertake some of these projects. Part of this study is that the Corps of Engineers hasn't studied the lower Mississippi River, how the water moves through the body carried to other estuaries, like the Mississippi Sound, since they constructed it.
That's something that state political leaders in Mississippi and in Louisiana — in the state houses — take issue with. Mississippi Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann has been very critical of how the spillway is operated and the state not having any say in it. The lieutenant governor of Louisiana, Billy Nungesser, has echoed Hosemann on that criticism and has said that he hopes the states somehow can work together to find a solution to where all of that floodwater is not just sent into the Mississippi Sound.
In 2019, that was the equivalent of 6 trillion gallons of water from the Mississippi River. That brings me to another point — what can be done upstream. The Mississippi River has water contributed to it from as many as 31 states in the United States through different tributaries and other river systems. That is not just freshwater being added into an estuary which has brackish water, but that water has nutrients. It has farm runoff. It has urban runoff. It has all these pollutants that are making their way into the Mississippi River being sent straight, when the spillways open, into the Mississippi Sound.
Another discussion, outside of bringing Mississippi voices to the table, is what can we do upstream in Missouri, Minnesota and these other states to prevent more agricultural nutrients and fertilizer from entering the water so that if the spillway needs to be operated, which it certainly will be in the future, what can be done to at least limit the effects in the impact of that water on estuaries like the Mississippi Sound?
I think a lot of people, when they think of a dead zone in the northern Gulf of Mexico, they think of this really big patch of water just southwest of Louisiana. Researchers at Louisiana State University have recently found a dead zone in the Mississippi Sound. It’s, I believe, more than 1500 square miles and they think it could grow. These things are always in flux, but that's a direct byproduct of these nutrients entering estuaries and the Gulf. That's another thing that these leaders want to see done – the reduction of these pollutants being added to the water and a little more regulation around it.
This story was produced by the Gulf States Newsroom, a collaboration among Mississippi Public Broadcasting, WBHM in Alabama and WWNO and WRKF in Louisiana and NPR.
