Free Republic

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said Wednesday it has overturned the approval of a massive flood-control project in the south Mississippi Delta that officials said was erroneously greenlit in the final days of the Trump administration. In a letter to the Army for Civil Works, EPA officials said the past administration's November 2020 decision to approve the Yazoo Pumps Project was in violation of the Clean Water Act and “failed to reflect the recommendations from the career scientists and technical staff.”

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Floodwaters overwhelmed a miles-long sandbag barrier over the weekend, drenching another community in the southern end of the Mississippi Delta. Volunteers, prisoners and others had stacked 100,000 sandbags and more than 600 wire flood-control baskets, trying to keep water out of hundreds of homes at Eagle Lake, north of Vicksburg. But water trapped inside a levee system keeps rising... ...The lake is among multiple oxbow lakes along the lower Mississippi River that are lined with houses, a mix of permanent residences and weekend getaways. It's another casualty in a backwater flood that's the highest since 1973,...

Rory Doyle’s ongoing personal project shares the story of African-American cowboy culture in the rural Mississippi Delta, challenging the Hollywood portrayal of the American cowboy. The work highlights the black cowboys and cowgirls in the Delta as a proud group existing beyond the movie image of the American West. The project began in early 2017 when Doyle attended a rodeo celebrating black cowboy heritage in the region. Over the past year, he’s documented this band of horse riders in a place not typically known for its cowboys. A recent article from Smithsonian magazine estimated that one in four cowboys was...

Thinning Cotton, Growing up on the Mississippi Delta When I was a boy, my father worried that I was unlikely to go far in life until I overcame my stubborn nature, and whenever he tried to convince me of that, I stubbornly persisted the he was confusing stubbornness with persistence. One day, after putting up with my hard-headedness as long as he intended to, he said, “Junior, since you work with Jaybird every day, I’ll ask him about all this persistence you profess to have.” Early the next morning, my boyhood best friend and mentor Jaybird took his work crew...

Time stood still in what I now remember as a pristine, open-air, chapel, where a congregation of two melded their souls with Mother Nature’s glory After serving in World War II, my father raised cotton on two hundred Mississippi Delta acres. The wealthy doctor who owned the land loaned him enough money to buy a tractor and a cultivator. Single-handedly and determined, he worked the land, made his first crop, and launched a 50-year farming career. When a much larger farm came up for sale, the doctor loaned Dad the money to buy it. I was ten years old, and...

Scientists predict a Haiti-magnitude earthquake along the New Madrid fault during the next 50 years. The fault runs under the Mississippi Delta, one of the poorest parts of the US.

THE deaths caused by Hurricane Katrina are heart-rending. The suffering of survivors is wrenching. Property destruction is shocking. But perhaps the most agonizing part is that much of what happened in New Orleans this week might have been avoided. Watching the TV images of the storm approaching the Mississippi Delta on last Sunday, I was sick to my stomach. Not only because I knew the hell it could unleash (I wrote an article for Scientific American in 2001 that described the very situation that was unfolding) but because I knew that a large-scale engineering plan called Coast 2050 — developed...