Environmental Defense Applauds Judge’s Decision to Stop Construction of Flawed Mississippi River Floodway Project in Missouri
To: ENVIRONMENTAL EDITORS
Contact: Sharyn Stein, +1-202-572-3396, sstein@environmentaldefense.org or Sean Crowley, +1-202-572-3331, scrowley@environmentaldefense.org, both of Environmental Defense
WASHINGTON, Sept. 14 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — Environmental Defense today praised a court decision to stop the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from building a flawed flood control project that would cut off the Mississippi River from the last major piece of the floodplain to which it is still connected and in the process would have devastated tens of thousands of acres of floodplain wetlands while failing to provide the flood control benefits it promised.
Upholding claims made by Environmental Defense, Judge James Robertson of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ordered that the Corps stop construction on the St. John’s Bayou/ New Madrid Floodway Project, that it remove any part of the project that it has built so far and that it restore the area to its historic condition. In taking this unusual step, the court found that ” … the Corps of Engineers has resorted to arbitrary and capricious reasoning — manipulating models and changing definitions where necessary — to make this project seem compliant with the Clean Water Act and the Nation Environmental Policy Act when it is not.”
Judge James Robertson of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia sided with Environmental Defense in his decision, ordering that construction be stopped on the St. John’s Bayou/New Madrid Floodway Project, that any part of the project built so far be removed, and that the area be restored to its historic condition.
“This single project would drain more acres of wetlands than all the wetlands drained by the country’s developers in a single year, yet it would not reduce the frequency of flooding in the towns it was intended to benefit,” said Tim Searchinger, the attorney who represented Environmental Defense and the National Wildlife Federation in the lawsuit. “I’m happy the court agreed to halt the project.”
The court also set aside the Environmental Impact Statements the Army Corps had filed for the project and invalidated the environmental analysis used to justify it under the Clean Water Act. The decision said that the Corps’ manipulation of the analysis “gives new meaning to the phrase ‘result- oriented decision- making’” and that many parts of the analysis “lack factual support or substantial evidence.”
“This project underscores the imperative that the Corps make a total shift away from traditional flood control projects that destroy wetlands to ecosystem restoration projects in the Mississippi Basin,” said Jim Tripp, general counsel for Environmental Defense.
The St. John’s Bayou/New Madrid Floodway Project was designed for an area that is the last remaining major floodplain habitat on the lower Mississippi River. The area provides vital habitat for spawning fish. The Corps project would eliminate most of this habitat and mitigate the problem by providing habitats that the fish could not access — in other words, habitats that for the most part did not really exist. The court decision noted that many of the Corps’ decisions about the project seemed to be based on cost alone, and did not take into account the vast possible damage to the environment or the limited flood protection the project would ultimately provide.
Contact:
Sharyn Stein — 202-572-3396 or sstein@environmentaldefense.org
Sean Crowley — 202-572-3331 or scrowley@environmentaldefense.org
SOURCE Environmental Defense
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