Dredging of the Tallahatchie River!

[BR549]

Well I don't know what big army ditch you could be talking bout but steele bayou. I can assure you everything south of yazoo refuge is POSTED! You want to know what happened to the area around yazoo wildlife??? The piss poor management of the place that's what. They have all the wells they need, all the manpower and knowhow to do it, The uscoe built them nice new structures on the end of Swan Lake just to help hold the water and make it controlable. Put in at least one and I think two new wells just for the purpose of flooding Swan Lake back to what it use to be. They've never been turned on!!!!! The people running that refuge won't pump any water! It interferes with their precious deer hunting! Been that way up there for the last 25 years now. Yea they pump a little after the season and drop a few truckloads of corn out when they want to do a little banding. They might flood the two field along side the highway just for show but that's it!!!! Don't believe me just fly over the damn thing in the winter! I can remember when it was still a hunting club. Hunted in there too. But the Yazoo Wildlife people have ruined this not the COE or the dredging. Same with Panther Swamp, Malmasion, Hillside and I think one more. They are all part of the Yazoo Wildlife Complex. You want a cause to fight for for ducks, jump all over this one please!!!! This place can and used to be managed way better than it is now!

[Wildfowler]

Well I don't know what big army ditch you could be talking bout but steele bayou. I can assure you everything south of yazoo refuge is POSTED!

Yes, I'm looking at my map now and realize we were actually south and east of Yazoo. You think that land may be posted too?

Looking at my map, I think the big ditches that I am talking about might be a series of ditches that might drain into the deer creek near the Washington, Issaq., Sharkey county corner. I'll say again, I'm not from that area and don't really know what it was. It was a pretty substantial channel of water. The fellows I were hunting with just referred to it as an army ditch when citing this body of water along with other corp work as a likely cause into why the duck hunting isn't as good as it was. According to them, the area just doesn't hold water like it used to, which is key to holding ducks in a region. I'm sure the mis-management at Yazoo doesn't help, but it's not the only cause of the problem in that region. My point is that when this flooding occurred, the hunting in that part of the state was tremendous. The hunting is good where we were otherwise. But when the whole area was out, it was really good., and the same thing still happens regularly in the Quitman/Tallahatchie floodplain.

It's too bad we don't have the same type of adjoining bottomland hardwood surrounding the banks of the Tallahatchie/Coldwater, Sunflower, like they do over in Arkansas. Probably wouldn't be having this discussion. It would probably be a much larger NWR than what is up there now.

Help me understand something please. Was this flooding south of the Yazoo refuge that I'm talking about, or even the flooding that occurred at the end of the 05 season that I asked about earlier considered a once per 100 year flood? What about the regular flooding in the NE delta that this topic is supposed to be about? Would the pump make this amount of flooding a thing of the past or could we still expect to see this from time to time?

I'll try and refer to my hunting log to verify the date of the flooding south of Yazoo that I asked about? That may help.

Thanks.

[Wildfowler]

Looks like the Yazoo flooding I'm asking about happened the 1st week of Dec., 2001. I wonder if the newly updated Corps data goes back that far?.........



As a matter of fact it does. Here's the level of the Steele bayou landside gauge during the time period in question:




Here's the Steelebayou at Grace:



If I'm understanding this correctly, it looks like the flooding that happened south of Yazoo refuge in 2001 would have happened regardless of the pumps being in place. If I remember correctly, there was a lot of territory that flooded in addition to the area that I'm talking about. A lot of hunters were mad at the flooding that happened so early in the season. All of this would have happened regardless of the pumps. Wouldn't it? Didn't we say that the pumps wouldn't even kick on until landside gauge reads 87 feet?

Looks like it took a few weeks for the high water around the Grace area to reach the landside area, but it never made it to 87 feet. I've guess I've answered my own question. This must have not been a once/100 year flood that happened. In fact, in spite of all the dredging and channelization, this localized flooding still happened. I'm not sure if the Steele Bayou was closed or not during this event, looks like it wouldn't have mattered until later in the month anyway.

I am trying to honestly evaluate this for myself. Sometimes I may come across the wrong way here, but I really do what to understand all of this before I pass personal judgment.

This probably should have been posted on the recent Yazoo topic. Sorry to wander. I still don't want to loose the Tallahatchie.

[mudsucker]

THIS is how we are going to leave this all important dicussion? I am back on the dredge boat and ready to suck some mud! Let the pumps RUMBLE!

[BR549]

I wondered why you were "dredging" all this stuff back up!