In statements filed with the Army Corps of Engineers, which launched a two-year feasibility study of the project with a public hearing Thursday night, critics of the proposed dam said its benefits might not outweigh its potential negative consequences.
“I think this could have some horrible impacts on the Pearl River,” said Cynthia Sarthou, executive director of the Gulf Restoration Network, and umbrella organization for 50 conservation groups in the Gulf of Mexico region. “It could affect everyone in the Pearl River basin.”
Proposed by Jackson landowner and businessman John McGowan, the project calls for damming the Pearl River - which runs from near Louisville, Miss., to Lake Borgne near Pearlington – below Jackson. The so-called “LaFleur’s Lake project” would create 12 miles of lakes in downtown Jackson, bringing new development opportunities throughout the river’s flood plain, including a 600-acre island across from the city’s downtown, McGowan said.
At the same time, McGowan said, the dam would allow officials to regulate the river’s level where it flows through the city. When storms increase the amount of water flowing into the river, officials could allow more water through the dam.
McGowan and other proponents say the dam would cost less than competing flood-control efforts, while allowing developers to remake the Mississippi capital as an American Venice or Amsterdam, with canals snaking through urban streets.
In fact, the project would turn the Pearl River into the rough equivalent of the Red River in Shreveport, the Cumberland River in Nashville, Tenn., or the Seine in Paris, all of which were transformed by dams and locks, McGowan said.
“If you look at the Seine, you’re not looking at a river,” he said. “It should be a mosquito flat just like this one.”
Transforming the Pearl River into the Seine would come at a high cost, opponents said. Several said McGowan’s dam would increase development in ecologically sensitive areas, change water levels in an area already designated critical habitat for the endangered Gulf sturgeon and permanently flood about 10,000 acres.
The consequences to the lower Pearl River remain unknown, said Carlton Dufrechou, executive director of the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation, which opposes the plan.
“Discharge could go into the Mississippi Sound or Lake Borgne, changing hydrology in a major way,” Dufrechou said. “Will there be water-quality impacts? Sure. Down as far as the mouth of the Pearl River? We’re not sure.”
If the project changes hydrology in Lake Borgne, it could lead to legal consequences too, according to Louisiana state officials. Lake Borgne oyster harvesters recently received more than $661 million in court judgments after they sued the state, saying its Caernarvon Freshwater Diversion Project permanently destroyed their leased oyster beds by allowing fresh water to flow over them through a gate in the Mississippi River.
State and federal scientists, along with hydrologists and oceanographers from Louisiana’s major universities say fresh water from Caernarvon could not reach Lake Borgne which is separated from the diversion by several roads and the deep-water Mississippi River Gulf Outlet. But several of those same scientists said changing the Pearl River’s flow could affect aquatic resources throughout the area.
“A reduction in freshwater flow and a drop in water quality could seriously affect our marine resources in the estuary,” said Patrick Banks, a fisheries biologist with the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries.
That’s why the dam project won’t change the river’s flow, said McGowan, who instead says that by removing obstacles now obstructing the river’s path, officials will gain more control over water levels, including the power to prevent flash floods.
“We’re not going to take a cubic foot of water away from them and we’re not going to send them an extra cubic foot,” he said. “The same amount of water that comes into Jackson is going to go out of Jackson. Just not in a way that’s harmful to Jackson.”
Several corps officials have spoken publicly against the plan, but the agency is splitting the cost of a two-year study with two Mississippi counties, McGowan said. Concerns raised during that process would receive consideration in the final plan, he said, including the flooding of wetlands, which he said would be rebuilt elsewhere through a government mitigation program.
“Most of the environmentalists I know with any sense admit that when you’ve got a metropolitan area with 300,000 people in it and a river flowing through it that’s a snake pit and mosquito hole, you can’t make a preservation stand there,” he said. “What they get out of this is a big chunk of mitigation somewhere else.”