‘We’re under assault.’ New group plans action to protect the Mississippi Sound.
The opening of the Bonnet Carré Spillway is only one of numerous threats to the Mississippi Sound, where water quality has deteriorated to the point that South Mississippi’s way of life and cultural identify are threatened.
“If we don’t understand this is a threat to all of us that we’ve got to deal with, the whole Gulf of Mexico is going to be dead,” says Gerald Blessey, a former Biloxi mayor who is managing the new Mississippi Sound Coalition.
“I think there’s nothing more important to do for the rest of my life than try to help solve this problem,” said Blessey, 77. “It’s a national problem that has terrible local consequences. It needs a national solution but the local folks will have to fight for it.”
All 15 local governments in the three Coast counties are likely to join the coalition, with 12 already onboard and three others voting as early as this week.
The coalition aims to tackle immediate and long-term threats to the Mississippi Sound. Members see a once dynamic seafood industry sinking because of fluctuations in water quality.
Tourists question the quality of seafood, and they encounter with increasing frequency signs that warn them to stay out of the water because of potentially high bacteria levels. This summer, blue-green algae also bloomed from shore to shore, fed by Mississippi River water flowing into the Sound from the Bonnet Carré.
Salinity levels fluctuate so widely that oyster beds have died off and fishermen can no longer rely on abundant catches of brown shrimp, crab and finfish, Paul Mickle, the chief scientific officer at the state Department of Marine Resources, told coalition members at an organizational meeting earlier this week.
“There is just no way to have the production of seafood that we enjoyed for so many years,” Mickle said, noting that the Western Sound had the most productive seafood grounds in the world back in the early 1900s.
Days of abundance
The release of trillions of gallons of Mississippi River water into Lake Pontchartrain and the Sound is only one issue.
Agricultural runoff, wastewater discharges and other pollutants flow from the Mississippi River’s mouth into the northern Gulf of Mexico, each summer creating a dead zone where aquatic life is unable to live or thrive. The river drains all or part of 31 states and two Canadian provinces.
While measures are being taken to reduce runoff, Blessey believes changes to federal law might be needed to improve water quality. He says the federal government could put money into reducing agricultural runoff the way it assisted local governments in treating sewage.
Blessey, who grew up in East Biloxi, believes the country needs a Marshall Plan for the Mississippi River Basin to curb pollution and update flood control measures the federal government adopted back in 1928.
Blessey remembers the Mississippi Sound when grass beds extended from just offshore to Ship Island and fish, oysters and crabs were plentiful.
“It was just so remarkable,” he said. “We could go down to the foot of Holley Street and you could catch a dozen crabs with a chicken neck on a string in about 15 minutes, and you could throw a cast net and it would be just loaded with mullet or fish for speckled trout right offshore.”
He could pick up oysters at low tide off the south side of Deer Island, where oysters planted through a DMR initiative died en masse this year after the Bonnet Carré opened for an unprecedented 143 days. Salinity in the Sound dropped to levels too low for the oysters to survive. DMR documented a 96 percent oyster mortality rate this year.
Blessey sees an opportunity to bring back the Mississippi Sound’s bounty, but acknowledges the effort will take years and cooperation across government lines — local, state and federal.
Taking action
The Bonnet Carré is the most immediate and pressing threat to the Sound, coalition members who attended the meeting agreed. The coalition has retained prominent environmental attorney Robert Wiygul of Ocean Springs to explore legal options as another year of potential flooding on the river approaches. The cities of Biloxi and D’Iberville, along with Harrison County, are picking up the tab for now.
Another top environmental attorney, Teri Wyly of Gulfport, joined Wiygul in speaking to the coalition. She and her firm, Balch & Bingham, also represented the state after the 2010 BP catastrophe in the Gulf.
“This is not unlike the BP oil spill,” Wyly said. “This is a situation where we’re under assault. What we can do is evaluate our legal options.”
The Corps opened the Bonnet Carré only eight times between the 1930s, when it was built, and 2007. Since 2008, it has been opened six times, including twice in 2019. The spillway for the first time stayed open through the summer, subjecting the Sound to algae blooms that come with warmer weather.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which operates flood control systems on the Mississippi River, has broad immunity from litigation. But Wiygul says it is not impossible to hold the Corps accountable. Under federal law, the Corps is supposed to consider the impacts the river water has on the environment when the spillway is opened and alternatives to reduce any harm.
Mississippi also wants a formal voice in flood control decisions, many officials have said. As it is now, the Corps’ 137-page Water Control Manual on the Bonnet Carré barely mentions the Mississippi Sound. The 10 water quality-monitoring stations the manual lists are all in Louisiana.
Factoring in the Pearl
As Mickle pointed out, the Mississippi is only one river that influences salinity levels in the Sound. The Pearl River, the state’s largest, empties into the Western Sound and for years nourished the salty water, allowing oysters to thrive. But the Pearl has two mouths and the eastern branch of the river that influences the Sound is flowing at a far lower rate than it did historically.
When the Sound is too salty, predators attack and kill the oysters. A Corps fix in the 1990s failed to work, so salinity levels in the Western Sound have been higher than the ideal in the last 13 to 15 years, with the exception of those times the Bonnet Carré has been open and swung salinity too far down.
“We’ve never experienced this extreme before,” Mickle said. Returning the Pearl’s two branches to historical flow rates needs to be a priority, he said.
“We don’t have uncertainly about what these species need.” he said. “We may not get the Sound working like it was 100 years ago, but we can get it working.”
