Memphians Need a Cleaner River

WHEN IT COMES to water quality, describing the Mississippi River as “the Big Muddy” might be a little too kind. As most locals know, by firsthand experience or by reputation, the waters of the great river along Tennessee’s western border aren’t exactly pristine.

Maybe that didn’t matter years ago, when the Mississippi was mainly used by barges shipping goods from Point A to Point B.

However, for various reasons, the ways people in Memphis want to use the river are changing. And that means there couldn’t be a better time to take steps to improve the river’s cleanliness.

City officials are planning to begin construction soon on a $27 million project called Beale Street Landing. According to Benny Lendermon, president of the Riverfront Development Corp., the goal is to create a multilevel park that would allow citizens to get close to the water’s edge.

“It’s all about access,” Lendermon was quoted as saying in an eight-part series on the river published in The Commercial Appeal last December. Lendermon said Beale Street Landing and other projects like it could help get more people involved in river recreation.

“I see more users, more people out there,” he said.

A fine goal, to be sure. But visitors to Beale Street Landing might find it a bit off-putting that the city discharges up to 225 million gallons of wastewater into the river each day, much of it from a treatment plant a short distance upstream from the planned Downtown park.

In the past, city officials have argued that it wasn’t necessary to disinfect the wastewater because the river isn’t used much for recreation.

“The Mississippi River obviously isn’t something that people go swimming in on a regular basis,” public works director Jerry Collins said in last year’s “Mystery Mississippi” series. If city leaders are serious about increasing recreational use of the river, they ought to rethink that policy.

There may be another reason why they should as well. As Tom Charlier reported in Monday’s newspaper, the state of Mississippi has filed a federal lawsuit against Memphis over water rights issues.

Mississippi claims that Memphis has been unfairly draining too much water from an underground aquifer beneath the Mississippi- Tennessee border. Officials with the Memphis Light, Gas and Water Division, the city-run utility company, say they’re well within their rights to extract water from the northern side of the border.

Because the case is practically unprecedented, it’s hard to know if Mississippi’s legal claim is a strong one. And that means MLGW should do what it can to prepare for the possibility that a ruling might go against the city.

If it does, Memphis would most likely need to find alternate sources of drinking water. And, as unappealing as it sounds, that means the city might need to tap into the Big Muddy. So for that reason as well, reducing the amount of pollutants that Memphis pumps into the river seems like common sense.

No, Memphis can’t control pollution that goes into the river at other points upstream. But the city should do what it can to avoid making the water quality worse.

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A Long Ignored Problem

It’s time for Memphis officials to get serious about cleaning up pollution in the Mississippi River.

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(c) 2007 Commercial Appeal, The. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.