When a man who saved six billion dollars for Mississippi ratepayers talks, it’s a good idea to listen.
Now this man is trying to save trillions of dollars for Louisiana. We need to listen.
When the $7.6 billion Kemper power plant was being hyped, it was Kelley Williams who said the emperor had no clothes. He was ignored. But he persisted. Persistence, along with unusual intelligence combined with common sense, is one of Kelley’s many great traits.
Somewhere along the line, I started listening to Kelley, just out of a reporter’s curiosity. I kept asking questions and step by step, I realized everything Kelley said turned out to be right and everything the Kemper advocates said turned out to be wrong.
It was an amazing team, consisting of more than a dozen individuals, including the Bigger Pie Forum foundation, Ashby Foote, Forest Thigpen, Kelley Williams Jr,. Clarke Reed, Charles Grayson, Bruce Deer, Tom Blanton and many more. As Kelley likes to say, my role was the megaphone.
We stopped it in the nick of time, just before the Public Service Commission was about to vote that the project was “prudent.” If that had happened, the 186,000 Mississippi ratepayers would have been stuck with the full $7.6 billion dollar cost. It would have been an economic albatross around our state for decades to come.
During all this, we were followed, a fake organization called Job Keepers Alliance was created to battle us, full page ads were placed in the Clarion-Ledger impugning our character. My friends were worried for my safety. There was a disturbing history of unexplained deaths related to similar opponents of past projects. Being not a paranoid person, I dismissed it all as nonsense.
We succeeded and much of Kemper, the greatest construction project in the history of Mississippi, is back to being a vacant field, its infrastructure sold as scrap metal. Mississippi Power converted what was left into a very expensive natural gas electricity plant. But the rest of the cost, $6.4 billion, Mississippi Power, not the ratepayers, had to eat.
A year or so later at the Stennis Capitol Press Forum in Jackson’s Capitol Towers, former Public Service Commissioner and PSC chairman, Brandon Presley publicly acknowledged our critical role in saving billions for the state. It was my finest hour as a journalist and it was all Kelley.
Since then, Kelley has weighed in on all the big issues of the day and has been uniformly right on Covid, PERS, the harmful effect of our state’s data center boom and many others.
But all this pales in comparison to Kelley’s latest crusade — stopping the avulsion (i.e. change of course) of the Mississippi River at the Old River Control Complex. As providence would have it, Kelley found himself in the epicenter of one of the greatest natural catastrophes the U. S. will ever face.
The Old River Control Complex (ORCC) is designed to prevent a disaster — the Mississippi changing course and flowing down the Atchafalaya Basin. This would kill dozens, hundreds maybe thousands of people and would leave Baton Rouge and New Orleans without the Mississippi. Trillions of dollars in oil, gas and chemical infrastructure would become scrap metal overnight. And Morgan City, with a population of 11,000 souls, would be no more.
Kelley did not set out to be the Paul Revere of this impending disaster. It started when he noticed huge sand dunes deposited on his property by the 2016 flood. He started asking questions.
Kelley realized something was wrong. Five hundred other Mississippi landowners joined his cause, along with Delbert Hosemann who, as Secretary of State, oversaw flooded 16th Section land. They filed a federal lawsuit against the U. S. Corps of Engineers, led by Lexington’s Don Barrett, arguably the most successful plaintiffs’ attorney in the history of our state.
Through lawsuit discovery, Kelley, his son George, and Barrett’s group were able to uncover a mountain of evidence that the Corps has long known of the problem, yet covered it up and dismissed the engineering studies confirming the danger. The rank-and-file engineers realize the impending disaster, but the Corps poohbahs, who are in and out in three years, kept kicking the can to their successors.
Over the last eight years, Kelley has written three dozen columns on this issue. I am blessed to have a role in publishing these columns and distributing them throughout the state on the Emmerich News platform of 22 hyperlocal websites and newspapers.
It’s not just a Louisiana issue. The flooding problems caused by Corps inaction affects a huge portion of Mississippi and the Yazoo River basin as well. In 2019, Yazoo basin flood waters remained for over seven months.
The problem is not hard to explain. The Old River Control Complex was built 60 years ago south of the Mississippi/Louisiana state line to ensure the Mississippi River doesn’t change course and flow down the Atchafalaya Basin. It worked.
But then 25 years ago the Corps approved a hydroelectric plant, immediately above the ORCC. It produces a mere 192 megawatts, less than one percent of Louisiana’s electricity needs.
Hydroelectricity plant turbines need clear, sediment free water, so the clearest river water was diverted to the plant, leaving the sediment flowing down the Mississippi with less water to push it along. Over time, this has led to a huge accumulation of sediment just below the ORCC. Kelley has termed this “mudberg.”
The Corps was supposed to require the plant’s owner, now Brookfield Renewable Partners, to dredge to prevent silt buildup, but they never did. Mudberg now threatens the operation of the ORCC.
By raising the tailwater elevation downstream of the structures, it reduces their hydraulic capacity and increases the head differential the gates must hold back during a flood. It’s just a matter of time before a major flood, worsened by Mudberg, overwhelms the ORCC, causing the river to change course and forever changing the economy of south Louisiana — as well as the economy of middle America which depends on the ports at the mouth of the Mississippi for exports and imports. If the Mississippi changes course, these ports will be inaccessible.
It would also be a blow to what remains of the Acadian (Cajun) culture along the broader Atchafalaya Basin area, home to hundreds of thousands of people.
Now that Mudberg has grown to an immense size, it would cost billions to dredge it. But it would save trillions.
Decades ago, a vibrant local news industry would have broken this story long before it reached such a danger level. Now it’s left for a small non-profit called Bigger Pie and one of a dwindling number of local news companies, Emmerich Newspapers.
It reminds me of the old adage:
For want of a nail the shoe was lost;
For want of a shoe the horse was lost;
For want of a horse the rider was lost;
For want of a rider the message was lost;
For want of a message the battle was lost;
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost;
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.
