“The biggest mistakes are mistakes of omission, not commission. It’s the things you knew enough to do — they were within your circle of competence — and you were sucking your thumb. Those are the ones that hurt.” — Warren Buffett, University of Georgia, 2001
CEOs of petrochemical plants and refineries on the lower Mississippi River may make Buffett’s omission mistake — and stop the river from flowing by their plants. It will hurt.
The river tried to change course to the Atchafalaya in 1973. It almost did. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) stopped it. The Atchafalaya is a shorter, steeper route to the Gulf near Morgan City. Gravity makes the river find a shorter, steeper course every 1,000 years or so when the old course silts in. The old course by Baton Rouge and New Orleans has silted in. A course change is inevitable. It will leave plants and refineries stranded on a saltwater estuary.
In 1973, I was CEO of a public company with fertilizer plants on the river below Baton Rouge. They depended on river transportation and water. The Corps kept the river flowing for them and others. I was blissfully ignorant that it could stop flowing. I learned that it can and that it can be delayed. This explains why it will change course and how to delay it.
In 1928, Congress put the Corps in charge of the river to prevent another 1927 flood disaster. The Corps raised levees to contain floods, straightened and shortened the river to speed floods to the sea, built dams and reservoirs to catch and slowly release rain and snowmelt, and built other flood control structures.
One of those structures discharges part of the Mississippi’s flow to Atchafalaya and thence swiftly to the Gulf to keep the rest meandering by New Orleans. It’s the Old River Control Complex (ORCC) just below the Mississippi-Louisiana state line. It began operating in 1963, was repaired and expanded after the 1973 flood, and worked as designed for 27 years.
Then in 1990, the Corps compromised its flood control mission and changed the way it operated the ORCC to favor a small, privately owned hydroelectric plant. That change caused sediments to fall out, clog the river, and create a bottleneck (Mudberg) just below the ORCC. Mudberg grew, slowed the river’s flow to the sea, and made floods higher and longer. By 2015, it had reduced flood flow discharge by 23%. That decrease and an 8% increase in rainfall made floods from Natchez to Greenville over twice as long in the five years after 2015 vs. before. They destroyed much of the bottomland hardwood ecosystem on a million acres inside the levees.
In 2018, some 45 years after the Corps saved my company’s plants, I learned that its longer, higher floods had taken farm ground and impaired the value of my property on the river just above the ORCC. My education began after the freak 2016 winter flood that closed the deer season along the river. That flood deposited sand dunes on my land that caused permanent damage. Earlier floods had caused no lasting damage.
I realized something had changed, but didn’t know what. I had heard of the Morganza Spillway and thought the Corps could open it and shorten floods. I was wrong. I learned that the Mississippi River Commission (MRC) supervises the Corps and holds semiannual forums for landowners to ask questions. I testified four times in 2016–17 and asked why flooding was worse. The Generals said it was more rain. They didn’t mention Mudberg.
Then in late 2017, LSU’s Dr. Y. Jun Xu presented a paper that explained why flooding was worse — and that the river could change course in a big flood. His paper was based on Corps data. It was no surprise to the Corps. But it was to me. It said Mudberg caused flooding to be worse. Corps sedimentation studies in 2015–16 confirmed this. They also predicted its bottleneck effects will get worse until the Corps restores the operation of the ORCC as designed.
In 2019, this information led the State of Mississippi and over 500 landowners in the batture (including me) to sue the U.S. Government seeking just compensation under the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution. The case is pending trial on the merits. The Federal Court of Claims moves slowly.
Mother Nature didn’t wait. The 2019–21 cluster of long floods completed the destruction of most of the bottomland hardwood ecosystem inside the levees and doomed the rest. The 2019 flood was above flood stage for 162 days at Vicksburg — the longest since the Great Flood of 1927. The Yazoo basin was flooded 219 consecutive days. I asked the Commanding MRC General earlier this year if the Corps would dredge Mudberg. Crickets. She may be waiting on orders.
In 2016, the Commanding General told me he couldn’t increase the Mississippi’s discharge to the Atchafalaya at the ORCC because: “That’s above my pay grade — Congress set the discharge rate. I follow orders. You’ll have to get Congress to change them.” This is to get Congress to order the Corps to dredge Mudberg.
That will cost billions. But it will delay trillions in cost to repair course change damage and develop the new route to the sea, and in the opportunity cost of lost river commerce while the new route develops. The new route will cut highways, pipelines, transmission lines, railroads, and other critical infrastructure affecting national security. Dredging Mudberg is cheap insurance.
There are over 150 petrochemical plants, industrial facilities, and refineries (about 18% of the country’s capacity) below Baton Rouge. Their CEOs can help get Congress to pay the premium. Landowners wish they would. They may wish they had.
“Of all the words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: it might have been.” — John Greenleaf Whittier
Kelley Williams, a Northsider, is chairman of Bigger Pie, a Jackson-based think tank promoting free markets and government efficiency.
