Bridge, Phillips, Elam Drainage District News

From the desk of Milton Sandy Jr November 6, 2011 Vol 2011-13This newsletter is directed to friends and supporters of our efforts to get something done about the repetitive flooding in Corinth and Alcorn

County which on May 2, 2010, caused loss of life, public and private property and threatened public health and safety by the massive release of raw sewage into flood waters. If you have news, questions or comments, please fire away.

Code RED Flood Threat Returns for November

The flood threat advisory for November is RED. As we discussed in prior newsletters, based on historic weather information September through November bring a much higher probability for flooding- calling for a SEVERE Flood Threat Advisory in November.

POETRY IN MOTION

On Thursday, October 20th, I was asked to speak to the Rotary Club about our progress on flooding issues in the city of Corinth. As I started writing notes on what to report early in that week, I was somewhat discouraged by the fact that despite all the paperwork and red tape that has been completed in the last year, not a single thing had transpired that would actually reduce the risk of damage from flooding from happening again to the same extent it happened on May 2, 2010.

Then, as if by magic, on Monday morning I received a call from an alert creek watcher who reported something going on south of Harper Road on Elam Creek near the sewer plant. I immediately rushed over and was overjoyed to see the East bank of Elam from the sewer plant almost to Bridge Creek had been cleared using an excavator equipped with a Fecon mulching head, very similar to the equipment we demonstrated last August.

In a matter of a few hours, the downstream blockage on Elam near the sewer plant had been cleared which had been left by Asplundh Tree

Contact: Milton Sandy Jr 662-286-6087 - Fax 287-4187 - E-mail mlsandy@tsixroads.com

Flood Threat for Nov

Weds 10/19/2011 Elam Creek looking North to Harper Road

Expert Company almost a year ago who never finished the job. It turns out that the Corinth sewer department had contracted with Mike Pittman Construction who hired a subcontractor, Larry Bonds Equipment from Burnsville, MS, who furnished a Komatsu excavator equipped with a FECON vegetation mulching head to do this clearing work. Mr. Bonds said that he had owned the FECON head approximately three years but had only recently gotten it operational with his excavator. He has been in the heavy equipment business for several years.

In the next few days, both sides of Elam were cleared all the way to its junction with Bridge Creek. Moving right along, the area on Elam from Hwy 72 to the KCS Railroad bridge was cleared which is one of the most constricted flow areas along Elam Creek. A great deal of flood debris was exposed and remains for the street department to follow up and clear. Watching the machine in action was like watching poetry in motion. You'll find the link to a short video at the bottom of the page on our website at:

http://www.bpedrainage.org/history.html

During this time, I was privileged to sit in on one of the planning meetings coordinating this work. I would like to commend Mayor Tommy Irwin, Street Commissioner Jim Bynum, Sewer Commissioners Billy Glover and Tommy Justice for their joint efforts to bring this off smoothly and quickly, once they got started. I don't have space for all the pictures but the progress in such a short time is really encouraging. As we demonstrated last August, there is no quicker, cleaner, more environmentally friendly way to help a drainage problem FAST.

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Thurs 10/27/2011 Clearing West side of Elam Creek just North of Hwy 72 overpass

Fri 10/28/2011 Elam Creek West side clear from Hwy 72 to KCS RR bridge

So as these pictures show and I'm happy to report I was able to give a whole lot more positive talk to the Rotary Club last week. I received a very hearty welcome and a lot of very pointed and thoughtful questions. It is very encouraging to find a group of civic minded citizens who are interested in our flooding and drainage problems and whatever progress we are making towards finding a solution.

I was pleased to report there is now work being done that has, in my opinion, reduced the risk of flooding damage as severe as what occurred on May 2, 2010. This is not a permanent fix, just a stop gap measure to buy some time to put effective continuing

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Operator Chris Harper sharply focused on clearing Elam Creek

11/5/2011 Elam Creek East bank looking North toward Mitchell St. bridge. Right side just cleared, left side was just as clear a year ago in August, 2010 by JPV Mulching. You can see how fast it grows and what we are up against if we don't have a continuous maintenance plan in place.

10/31/2011 Corinth street department's new articulating boom mower doing a great job clearing small brush on Elam Creek behind the county jail

maintenance procedures and other storm water measures into place.

MORE GOOD NEWS

Just this past week I received notice that our interlocal cooperation agreement between the City of Corinth and the Bridge Phillips Elam Concurrent Drainage Districts had been approved by the Attorney General's office. Copies have to be recorded with the Secretary of State's office and local Chancery Clerk Bobby Marolt as well.

This had been the last potential slowdown in the road to a smooth interface with the Tombigbee River Valley Water Management District when they are ready to start the drainage projects to benefit everyone here in the city of Corinth.

I would like to thank the new city attorney, Mr. Wendell Trapp for his efforts drafting an agreement which we hope will serve us for these immediate projects as well as any additional work not immediately foreseen. Mr. Bill Davis, former city attorney, and Mr. Chad Borden, BPECDD attorney, also share credit for helping to shape this agreement. Thanks also to Mayor Irwin and the Board of Aldermen for their suggestions and approval and to my fellow drainage commissioners, John Warren Henson and Hull Davis.

On the surface this does not appear that significant but I can assure you that a major amount of effort took place to bring it to completion. I was also pleased, no doubt in small part by the quality of our attorneys efforts, that the approval process which could have taken up to 60 days was completed in less than 2 weeks by Attorney General Jim Hood's office.

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Also in preparation for talking to the Rotary Club, I expanded and attempted to consolidate what I've learned about the history of flooding and drainage here in Corinth and Alcorn County. I thought I would pass that along to you as well. Sorry that it is so long and no pictures.

A SHORT HISTORY OF FLOODING AND DRAINAGE IN

CORINTH, MISSISSIPPI

In the beginning, God created heaven and earth. Some earth was covered in water and some was dry. In prehistoric times, the area we live in was first covered with water, a part of the Gulf of Mexico, and then became dry. Since then it has swung back and forth, depending on the rainfall and the condition of drainage systems.

Archaeologists tell us that all of the land where we live was once occupied for thousands of years by prehistoric people of whom we know relatively little. Most artifacts deteriorate rapidly in an environment that swings between wet and dry. Most recently the Chickasaw Indians inhabited this area and were forced to leave by coercion, persecution and other pressure starting around 1832.

The Government of the United States sold the lands acquired from the Chickasaws to private parties including large numbers of speculators. In the ensuing years, various state and local government bodies spent resources trying to protect the lands sold to private parties from flooding which occurred regularly throughout the ensuing years. The Federal Government pretty resolutely refused to get involved in flood prevention efforts, deferring this to a state and local issue.

On September 17, 1850, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the second Swamp Land Act by a wide margin of 120-53. The law ceded to certain states including Mississippi "the whole of those swamp and overflowed lands, made unfit thereby for cultivation " on the condition the state "exclusively" dedicate the revenue from the sale of those lands to building drainage projects.

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The intent was that citizens of the state would never again have to bear responsibility for draining wetlands or building levees.

As with a lot of Federal Government programs, things didn't work out as planned. Graft and corruption were the most lasting sordid historical track record of this Act.

In the late 1800's a great number of desperate landowners convinced the state legislature to enable property owners to form drainage districts to finance, build and tax themselves to pay for improvements to drainage on their lands. In Alcorn County, there were 18 drainage districts organized and 119 miles of drainage canals constructed from around 1906-1930. In Alcorn County, most of the work seemed to be designed and engineered well, completed, and debt paid off. In many other areas of the state, this was not always the case. Graft, corruption, bank failures, and defaults on debt were widespread.

Fast forward to the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. The Federal Government reluctantly again began to deal with flooding and drainage as a national issue. Most efforts were delayed, however, by the Great Depression and WWII. In the 1950's, efforts began again by the Federal Government to fix flooding once and for all. The effort was largely split between the U.S.Army Corps of Engineers for levees and the U.S.Dept. of Agriculture Soil Conservation Service (SCS) as far as drainage.

In Alcorn County, the U.S.Army Corps of Engineers has done a limited amount of work, primarily on the Hatchie River which is a tributary of the Mississippi River and part of the Lower Mississippi rivershed. The Soil Conservation Service has done the majority of flood mitigation work in Alcorn County since the 1950's and has worked on a comprehensive "watershed" basis focused on the Tuscumbia River. The Soil Conservation Service seemed to distance itself from the earlier drainage district work and in the late 1950's in Alcorn County started a new drainage district - the Tuscumbia Water Management District - to cover the entire Tuscumbia River Watershed and encompass most of the areas originally part of the 18 previous drainage districts. Over a period of the next 15 years or so, the SCS refined a plan to build a series of 24 watershed lakes to retain the flow of water and reduce the incidence of flooding. The Tuscumbia Water Management District committed to a portion of the cost by collecting drainage taxes from all

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properties within the county that would be benefited from this plan and the SCS committed to the balance. Only ten of the lakes got built, very little of the channel improvements were ever completed, and protests and political pressure ended the drainage taxes after 40 years.

The City of Corinth was a sponsor of the SCS plan. Two of the promised watershed lakes were located on Phillips and Bridge Creeks and would have benefited the City of Corinth. Elam Creek within the City of Corinth was supposed to be "improved". The only thing property owners within the City of Corinth ever received were the bills for Tuscumbia Water Management drainage taxes for 40 years.

The two areas for watershed retention lakes on Phillips and Bridge Creek have largely now been developed and would be difficult to complete today. The Elam Creek watershed was from the late 1800's to the 1950's the location for a rather thriving brick manufacturing business. At that time Elam Creek had a series of natural retention areas consisting of depleted clay pits which became lakes and ponds that were known locally as good bass fishing spots. Beginning in the mid-1940's and continuing into the 1970's, the City of Corinth filled in these former clay pits as dumps for garbage and industrial refuse. Some believe that the increased flooding in the Elam Creek area beginning in the 1970's can be attributed to these clay pits being converted from water retention areas to facilitating increased storm water runoff.

Now we arrive at the most recent part of this story. The Federal Government finally decided it was impossible to stop flooding. The only thing that could be done was to decide where floods were going to occur and prevent people from putting things where they would be destroyed. The only problem was the Federal Government gave much of the land to the States many years ago, the States encouraged people to buy the land, develop it, invest in it- now the

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Federal Government wanted to effectively take it back or at a minimum reduce its value greatly by prohibiting any development thereon.

How to do that? Well, a rather ingenious scheme was hatched. The Federal Government convinced State and Local governments to start restrictively regulating land under local laws in the mid to late 1970's preventing new development which could result in increased future flood damage. As a carrot to the local governments, National Flood Insurance would only be provided to those communities which signed this agreement.

As a token break to those property owners already in areas that were known to be subject to flooding sooner or later, subsidized flood insurance rates were given to structures built "pre-Firm" (before the adoption of flood plain regulations) regardless of their elevations. The hope would be that these structures would decay and implode on their own without cost to the flood insurance program. If property owners took out flood insurance and got flooded, they would be compensated by insurance for their flood loss. Local governments in either case would then prevent them from being rebuilt or redeveloped as part of the new restrictive floodplain regulation. In every case, this program is designed to place any blame and responsibility for taking existing property rights away squarely on State and local officials. Over time, this scheme was to reduce damage from flooding in somebody's lifetime. As a practical matter, if it had been enforced, it probably would have worked as planned and gradually reduced flooding damage.

The only fly in the ointment to this scheme is that in most cases, state and local governments didn't have a clue what they were agreeing to, paid little attention to restricting development, and in most cases were themselves the worst violators when it came to totally ignoring flood plain regulations. State and local governments historically are responsive to local voters and would rather "eat a bug" than make voters unhappy. Taking away property rights is a guaranteed surefire way to make a property owner unhappy. FEMA has also conveniently never checked up on how things were going for around 40 years in the City of Corinth.

In the 1960's Corinth became a model city for Urban Renewal and other Federal programs in the state of Mississippi. Drainage did not appear to be an issue during much of the planning for the work and grants done during that time. Two factors seemed to be at play. First, the city signed on with the Tuscumbia Water Management District which was supposed to be solving flooding problems in the county and presumably would look after the city. Second, much of the land within the city and surrounding it had been part of an agricultural economy until the early 1960's.

In the transition from agricultural economy to residential and industrial development, the landowners knowledge of and responsibility for drainage matters fell by the wayside. Most of the drainage commissioners for the original drainage districts died and their knowledge was forgotten. Everyone pretty much trusted the Federal Government thru the SCS (now NRCS) and the Tuscumbia Water Management District would take care of the City of Corinth's drainage problems.

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Which brings us up to today. The question of what is causing the repeated and increasing flooding in Corinth has never come up before, at least in court. FEMA is a part of the law suit brought by Kmart against the City of Corinth. We'll see what if any of these issues or this history are brought up or resolved in that case. If you would like to follow that case as it develops from the actual court documents filed, I've posted them on our website at:

http://www.bpedrainage.org/kmart-suit.html

PREHISTORIC INDIAN MOUNDS

Something motivated me to stop on a short trip to Jackson, TN, the other day and visit Pinson Mounds. I've been through there on the way to Jackson many times but never stopped. The state of Tennessee started acquiring the land around there in 1965 and created the Pinson Mounds State Archaeological Area which opened to the public in 1981. An observant pioneering surveyor, Joel Pinson, had been the first non-native American to discover the Pinson mounds in 1820. What he found is the largest Indian mound complex of the Middle Woodlands period in the southeastern United States.

What you see there is a really extreme case of forgotten history. While some of the Indians who occupied Pinson Mounds were in the later Mississippi Period of ancient history which we have heard of like the Chickasaws and Choctaws, what is really interesting is that these were occupied by Indians in the mid-Woodlands period which goes back to 200BC-500AD. There you are getting into some ancient history. What also struck me is the resemblance of the area around Pinson Mounds to the area around Corinth and the creeks draining it, leading to the Tuscumbia River. The land elevations around Pinson Mounds are almost exactly the same as those around Corinth. Pinson Mounds is located on the south Fork of the Forked Deer River. Access to water was

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Museum building at Pinson Mounds State Archeaology Park

important for transportation as well as for consumption and hygiene. Good clay was nearby which was important for pottery. Both attributes would seem to be common to the Corinth and Alcorn county area as well. My mind, of course, wonders if there was any connection between mounds and flooding which can occur anywhere rainfall is as prevalent as we experience. A mound would be a good spot to be in a flood it seems to me.

The question I would like to pose to any of our newsletter readers is whether anyone is familiar with Indian relics or sites in Alcorn County that might predate the Chickasaw Indian tribes with whom we are familiar.

PLEASE VOTE- TUESDAY NOVEMBER 8th

Would like to remind everyone to vote on Tuesday, November 8th. I am an independent candidate for the office of Alcorn County Tax Collector and if you reside in Alcorn County, I would appreciate your vote. I've been so busy on drainage work that I haven't spent a whole lot of time campaigning. My campaign was short and concise- if you missed it in the Daily Corinthian, you can see it all at:

http://issuu.com/mlsandy/docs/ads_1-6_combine102811

I'm sure you will as glad as I am to see the end of the barrage of recorded telephone messages, ads, and clutter of political signs. Let's hope we get some effective leadership to help us do more with less governmental resources in the future.

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11/2/2011- Mini Excavator at work clearing sediment and blockage in Elam Canal South side of KCS RR bridge behind old Wal-Mart shopping center