Kelley Williams told Greenville Rotary Club members that longer, more destructive flooding inside the Mississippi River levees from Greenville to Vicksburg is not simply “because it’s raining more,” but because of a man-made sediment “bottleneck” the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers created and has failed to fix.
Rotary program overview
Williams, former CEO of First Mississippi Corp. and now chairman of the public-policy group Bigger Pie Forum, spoke to the Rotary Club of Greenville about his theory that floods inside the levees in the Mississippi Delta and the Yazoo backwater area have become annual disasters because the river now drains more slowly to the Gulf of Mexico.
The Jackson resident, who owns riverfront farmland in Louisiana, framed his talk around “Lanterns on the Levee,” Greenville native William Alexander Percy’s 1941 memoir, and argued that flood control remains a “zero-sum game” in which “somebody floods more so somebody else floods less.”
1927 flood and today’s “poor Cajuns”
Williams opened by recalling how the levee above Greenville at Mounds Landing failed naturally in 1927, inundating the Delta for months before backwater finally drained to the Mississippi River at Vicksburg. He contrasted that with the Mississippi River Commission’s decision that same year to blow the levee at Caernarvon, below New Orleans, to save the city and flood poor Cajuns of Plaquemines Parish.
“Landowners upstream of Baton Rouge like you and me are today’s poor Cajuns,” Williams told Rotarians, saying that instead of dynamite, modern “agents” are lobbyists who help Congress decide which communities will flood more and which will flood less.
Old River Control and ‘Mudberg’
Much of Williams’ presentation focused on the Old River Control Complex (ORCC), a series of Corps structures at Old River, La., roughly 200 river miles downstream from Greenville, where the Mississippi can either continue toward Baton Rouge and New Orleans or divert into the Atchafalaya River.
The ORCC was built beginning in 1963 to delay the Mississippi’s geologically inevitable course change into the shorter, steeper Atchafalaya channel—142 miles to the Gulf compared with 335 miles along the present route. Williams said the complex was designed not only to split river flow, sending about 23 percent down the Atchafalaya and 77 percent past Baton Rouge, but also to pass sediments in “desirable proportions.”
“In 1990, the Corps changed how it operated Old River to send water to a small privately owned hydroelectric plant,” Williams said. “That change caused sediments to fall out below the structures and create a bottleneck.”
He calls that sediment mound “Mudberg” – a 30- to 40-foot-high accumulation in a narrowed river channel below Old River that he says slows the Mississippi, raises stages at and above the ORCC and lengthens floods all the way up to Greenville.
Longer floods, damaged land and habitat
Williams illustrated the impact with photographs from his farm, located about 30 river miles above Old River at mile marker 337.7, in what he described as “ground zero” for the new flooding pattern.
Before 2015, he said, high water inside the levees was generally short and often beneficial, with damage that could be repaired. He showed Rotarians a farm manager’s house flooded in 2011 and then raised on cribs and steel beams to sit above future flood stages.
“You can raise a house,” he said. “You can’t raise a bean field.”
On one farm road photographed in 2018, the river left sand deposits along cropland and woods. In a later photo, that road is buried under an estimated six to seven feet of sand, flanked by willows and cottonwoods, with the former bean field no longer usable.
Williams said prolonged flooding has killed bottomland hardwoods, wiped out mast-producing trees, and destroyed habitat for deer and turkeys. “We still have deer, not as many. We have no turkeys,” he said, noting that floodwaters repeatedly ruined nests.
He tied those changes to hydrologic data, arguing that between 1998 and 2015 the river’s discharge capacity below Mudberg fell about 23 percent, while rainfall rose only 8 percent. “Mother Nature caused the rain,” Williams said. “The Corps decreased the drain.”
Studies, near-miss and Corps response
Williams cited multiple studies and events to support his claim that Mudberg has worsened flooding and increased risk of a catastrophic course change.
He said LSU researcher Y. Jun Xu published a peer-reviewed paper in 2017 documenting a roughly 23 percent loss in discharge capacity between 1998 and 2015, and describing a 30-foot-high sediment mound and a channel narrowed by about half a mile below Old River.
He also pointed to Corps discharge data at Tarbert Landing, Miss., showing that the record 2011 flood crested 7.2 feet higher there than previous floods carrying the same flow. That higher stage, he said, surprised the Corps and contributed to a delayed opening at Morganza Spillway, which “almost overtopped” as water approached Baton Rouge and New Orleans.
Quoting Corps historian Charles Camillo’s book “Divine Providence,” Williams noted post-flood “rating curves” that showed “progressive deterioration of the discharge capacity” below Old River.
Williams told Rotarians he recently asked Maj. Gen. Kimberly Peeples, president of the Mississippi River Commission and commander of the Corps’ flood-control effort on the river, why the Corps doesn’t dredge Mudberg. He read from Peeples’ written response: “While dredging is vital for maintaining navigation channels, it is not always a feasible or sustainable solution for large-scale sediment accumulation due to scale, cost, and potential downstream impacts.”
His translation for the club: upstream landowners must continue to flood more so downstream interests can flood less.
A ‘doom loop’ and a call to Congress
Williams described what he called a Corps “doom loop” in which each institutional decision at Old River made the next one necessary and now prevents the Corps from shutting down the power plant or dredging the sediment.
He recounted that the original low-sill structure was damaged by the 1973 flood, reducing its head and diversion capacity, and that directing flow to the hydro plant in 1990 effectively replaced some of that lost capacity but allowed coarser sediment to settle into Mudberg.
“The plant’s capacity is now integral to the mission of Old River Control,” he said. “So the Corps can’t shut it down, but every year that operation makes Mudberg grow, stages rise, and floods last longer.”
Williams told Rotarians the Corps’ own updated sediment model in 2024 shows stages continuing to increase for the next 50 years. Without action, he said, the Mississippi will eventually abandon its current course, stranding refineries and petrochemical plants on the lower river, cutting off fresh water to New Orleans and other cities, and devastating the Atchafalaya Basin’s roughly half-million residents and its pipelines, transmission lines, highways and railroads.
“There is no happy ending to this story,” he said. “But there may be a less unhappy ending if the Corps stops dithering and explains the dilemma and the cost of doing nothing to Congress.”
Lanterns on today’s levees
Returning to Percy’s metaphor, Williams told the club that in 1927 lanterns on the levees helped expose and prevent pending disaster above Greenville, while a lack of lanterns in New Orleans preceded the deliberate flooding of Cajun communities below the city.
“In 1990 there were no lanterns at Old River when Mudberg began to form. Today there are still no lanterns,” he said. “We don’t know who is deciding not to dredge it—to make floods longer upstream, lower downstream and a course change more likely.”
He urged landowners to become “lanterns” by speaking up at the Mississippi River Commission’s Low Water Inspection Hearing in Vicksburg on Aug. 19, where the commission invites testimony from people along the river. He recalled an older man in a baseball cap who told a 2016 high-water hearing in Natchez: “I just want to go home. I just want to go home. I can’t. It’s flooded. It’s your fault.”
“The generals heard him,” Williams said, suggesting that unscripted public complaints can be more powerful than polished speeches.
Challenge to the press
Williams closed with a direct appeal to Greenville Rotarians and local journalists to press the Corps for a formal cost-benefit analysis comparing dredging Mudberg and planning for a managed course change with the cost of doing nothing.
He pointed to past work by Mississippi journalist Wyatt Emmerich, whose coverage of the Kemper County lignite power project’s runaway costs helped limit ratepayer exposure, as an example of how newspapers can “make them show the work” and save the public billions.
“You’re the last of a dying breed, but you’re vocal and effective,” Williams said. “You can be the lanterns.”
