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
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