Mary Catherine Brooks, Extension Associate II for Mississippi State University Delta Research and Extension Center and Delta Council, spoke about the backwater flooding in the Mississippi Delta at last week’s Greenville Rotary Club meeting.
One March morning in 2019, she ventured out to take photographs of south Delta areas affected by the flooding.
Not being from the Delta, Brooks said she never really knew the extent of flooding in the Delta area.
“Within that one day, I counted over 100 deer in about a five-mile radius and it seemed like every hundred feet down the road, there was another dead animal on the road that obviously didn’t die from the flood, but were pushed up into the higher areas on the highways because that was some of the only dry ground outside of a spool bank, and so the wildlife in the area has been decimated,” she said.
After returning to the office that afternoon, Brooks said they immediately created the “Forgotten Backwater Flood” Facebook and Instagram pages.
“We gained a thousand followers a day for the first week, we had posts that were engaging over 150,000 people, just single posts at a time and we reached over 46 countries in the first month alone, some of these numbers are even higher now,” she said.
Gaining so much attention so fast triggered the Facebook authorities to deem the issue as one of “national importance” and then required Brooks to send in certain documentation to vouch for the authenticity of the initiative.
From that attention came the grassroots movement, “Finish the Pumps,” a phrase which can be seen on billboards and signs along Highway 61, bumper stickers and other venues in the Mississippi Delta.
“It’s painted on tops of houses and everywhere … this whole movement has actually grown into a Mississippi nonprofit,” Brooks said, noting the nonprofit group on Facebook called Finish The Pumps, which has been doing work to help combat issues caused by the flooding.
Beyond animals, the backwater flooding has caused caskets to come up and graves that have shifted in the ground.
Brooks said what she thought would be only a couple of weeks was not what she imagined as it turned out to be a historical flood lasting over seven months.
Brooks spent time in Eagle Lake in which she captured numerous photos, one being of a woman fishing from her second story house to really illustrate the magnitude of the flooding.
After being in that area for a couple of months, Brooks said she became friends with many of the families who lived there.
She reflected on how initially, some of the residents were leery about her presence, but overtime developed relationships with her and invited her into their homes to dine with them and even provided gas from their personal pumps for her vehicle as there were no gas stations in operation nearby.
An emotional Brooks remembered when a storm hit the community in May, she was lying in bed and received an influx of messages from the residents sharing with her the little they were able to salvage as a result.
Brooks said the town was shut down completely after that and it wasn’t until three or four months before it reopened to the public.
Brooks shared photos of some of the families’ homes in the Eagle Lake area, some of them which had recently been purchased and redone at the time before the flooding.
Having to kayak to the home to determine if there was anything salvageable, one family whose home Brooks photographed, only saw the water rise over a few months and be completely lost to an excess of mold.
One thing Brooks said she had seldom thought about were the kids in the community. When she did, she discovered the taxing routine of them getting to and from school.
Brooks had interviewed a woman who was a storeowner, whose best friend was a school bus driver for the Eagle Lake area.
Brooks learned the kids were having to get up as early as 3:30 a.m. to catch a bus by 5:30 a.m. because it had to drive through three counties just to get to Vicksburg.
What should have been a roughly 15 to 20 minute drive to and from the school was significantly longer — nearly two hours, on top of having to boat out of their homes to higher ground to catch the bus, Brooks said.
“That was another aspect I never considered,” she said. “It’s really hard to grasp the concept of how bad this is, even seeing the photos.”
Brooks’ photos captured the devastation and damage of homes, wildlife, marine life, agriculture, trees and roads as a result of the flooding, much of it irreparable.
“What was once a beautiful retirement vacation community is just a disaster area,” she said.
Since then, the Mennonite Disaster Service has aided in demolishing the unsalvageable homes in an effort to help the families rebuild.
In October 2019, the Environmental Protection Agency came to Rolling Fork and held a listening session at South Delta High School and talked with the public and officials about solutions to the flooding issue.
According to Brooks, the EPA has been working toward a resolution that should be shared with the public soon.
For those eager and willing to help, there’s an online petition at change.org, which has 30,000 signatures so far including handwritten and online.
In addition to signing the petition, Brooks said writing elected officials and consistently applying pressure can make an impact.
“Educate and inform the rest of the United States and the world on what’s going on down here and just try to keep the momentum up any way you can,” she said.
