The U.S. EPA has vetoed a giant, expensive plan to build the world’s largest water pump in the Mississippi River delta. The so-called Yazoo Pump flood-control project would have sucked 6 million gallons of water a minute from 67,000 acres of wetlands along the Yazoo River. The scheme, proposed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and first authorized by Congress in 1941, would have cost $220 million. The EPA concluded that maybe, just maybe, sucking all that wet out of the wetlands would have been damaging to fish, wildlife, and migratory birds. “The EPA truly deserves our thanks for killing this unnecessary and economically wasteful Corps of Engineers project,” says the Sierra Club’s Ed Hopkins. “The natural, and free, flood protections offered by these wetlands are far more effective than an expensive pumping project.” Today’s veto was only the 12th time since 1972 that the EPA has put the kibosh on a Corps project; the last was in 1990.
