Mississippi Levee Board Chief Engineer Peter Nimrod told a packed room of Delta veterans Monday that doom-and-gloom warnings about the Old River Control Structure sending the Mississippi River down the Atchafalaya are exaggerated and self-serving, but a growing sediment “plug” below the structure is a real and urgent problem.
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Speaking to the Delta Veterans group in Greenville for the second time this year, Nimrod said he was invited back after a string of op-eds in the Delta Democrat-Times by Jackson businessman and Bigger Pie Forum chairman J. Kelley Williams raised fears that levees will overtop, the Mississippi will abandon its current channel and South Louisiana and the Delta are headed for catastrophe. Nimrod said he dislikes “doom and gloom” and came to “straighten a few things out” without attacking Williams personally.
Nimrod introduced his assistant engineer, Dustin Herman, who joined the levee board staff during the 2019 flood, and updated the group on leadership changes, noting that longtime Washington County commissioner David Cochran died earlier this year and has been replaced by Drew Newsom as the county’s representative on the Mississippi Levee Board. He described the board as “real lucky” to have Newsom and praised what he called a strong, experienced staff in Greenville.
Who is Kelley Williams?
Using slides drawn from Williams’ own biography, Nimrod described the 91-year-old as a “very smart, very successful” retired executive who built a fortune in agriculture, fertilizer and energy. Williams graduated in chemical engineering from Georgia Tech in 1956, earned an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1962 and later served as CEO of First Mississippi Corporation, a major agribusiness and chemical company.
Williams now lives in Jackson’s Eastover neighborhood and owns about 8,792 acres at Lake Mary, a batture tract between the Mississippi River and the Mississippi bluff hills below Natchez and just above the Old River Control Complex (ORCC). Nimrod estimated the land — which includes oil wells, agricultural fields and prime hunting property — as a roughly $50 million asset and quipped that Williams has “about $50 million more in assets” than he does.
Bigger Pie Forum and earlier fights
Since retiring, Williams has channeled his energy into Bigger Pie Forum, a policy watchdog group that has criticized projects such as the Kemper power plant and raised alarms about the Public Employees’ Retirement System of Mississippi. Nimrod said Williams was largely right about Kemper’s failures and PERS’ long-term strain but argued Williams tends to “dog” problems without offering workable solutions, saying he has pressed Williams repeatedly for concrete ideas on PERS reforms without getting a clear answer.
Around 2016, Williams turned his attention to the Old River Control Structure, publishing op-eds under headlines such as “More Flood for Less Rain” and “Flood control favors Louisiana at the Delta’s expense.” In those pieces, Williams argued that if the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers diverted more water through Old River into the Atchafalaya Basin, flood stages above Vicksburg would drop, reducing damage on batture lands such as his Lake Mary plantation and upriver properties in Mississippi.
How Old River control works
Nimrod used historical maps to explain how the Mississippi, Red and Atchafalaya rivers came together at Old River and why Congress intervened in the 1950s. In 1831, steamboat captain Henry Shreve cut a new channel that straightened a long bend in the Mississippi, leaving a side loop that later became known as Old River and maintained a connection to the Red River and Atchafalaya.
By the 1950s, more and more Mississippi flow was slipping through Old River toward the shorter, steeper Atchafalaya route, raising fears that the main river would abandon New Orleans and Baton Rouge. In 1954, Congress authorized Old River Control and required the Corps to maintain a 70–30 distribution: 70 percent of combined Mississippi and Red River flow must continue down the Mississippi, and 30 percent goes down the Atchafalaya.
Structures and power plant
The low-sill structure at Old River was completed in 1959, an auxiliary structure was added in 1986 after concerns about potential failure, and the Sidney A. Murray Jr. hydropower plant came online in 1990. The hydro plant generates about 192 megawatts, compared with about 754 megawatts planned for the new Greenville natural gas power plant, illustrating its smaller role in the regional power system.
Nimrod said the hydropower plant now carries about 75 percent of the flow at Old River, with roughly 20 percent routed through the auxiliary structure and 5 percent through the original low-sill control. That distribution, he said, means the “cleaner” outer-channel water feeds the turbines while sediment-laden water is disproportionately pushed through the Corps’ two control structures, contributing to deposition and a growing “bottleneck” of sand and silt below Old River.
Batture land and Lake Mary
Nimrod emphasized that Williams’ 8,792 acres lie entirely in the batture, the unprotected strip between the river and the Louisiana mainline levee on the west and the Mississippi bluff hills on the east. Under normal stages, the river stays in its banks, but when water rises above flood stage, the batture floods by design as part of the river’s floodplain.
With no levee protecting Lake Mary from the river, Williams’ land naturally floods during high water events, prompting his push for changes in the way Old River is operated to reduce stages at Natchez and Lake Mary. Nimrod said that desire is understandable from a landowner’s standpoint but argued Williams misrepresents the benefits farther upstream and the costs to Louisiana and navigation.
Corps modeling of flow changes
After Williams began arguing in 2016 that more water should be pushed through Old River, the levee board asked the Corps to run its hydraulic model with alternate splits of 60–40 and 50–50 instead of the current 70–30. The results, Nimrod said, confirmed that Lake Mary and nearby reaches would see lower stages and Natchez would see a small benefit, but effects disappeared by the time the river reached Vicksburg.
Because there was “no effect at Vicksburg,” Nimrod said he lost interest in the proposal on behalf of the South Delta, where even a modest reduction at Vicksburg could help Wolf Lake, the Carter area, Yazoo City and Steele Bayou backwater levels during major floods. He stressed that any attempt to send substantially more flow down the Atchafalaya would increase flooding and scour in that basin, while reducing Mississippi River flow below Old River would threaten navigation, increase saltwater intrusion and accelerate sediment deposition downstream.
Floodways and common misconceptions
Nimrod said Williams’ op-eds tap into common misconceptions he hears every flood season about the Morganza Floodway and the Bonnet Carré Spillway. Many people assume opening those structures sooner or wider would lower flood stages as far upstream as Greenville, he said, but Corps analyses show otherwise.
Bonnet Carré is at river mile 129.6 on the lower Mississippi, about 305 miles below Vicksburg, and Morganza is at river mile 283, about 152 miles below Vicksburg. Corps studies show that operating Bonnet Carré produces no measurable effect above Baton Rouge, about 100 miles away, and Morganza has no significant impacts above Natchez, about 80 miles away, meaning neither structure helps Vicksburg or Greenville during floods.
Elevation, slope and the “plug”
To illustrate the growing problem below Natchez, Nimrod built an Excel chart plotting flood-stage elevations from Cairo, Illinois, to the Gulf of Mexico and comparing the river’s slope in inches per mile. From Cairo to Memphis, the river drops about 5 inches per mile at flood stage, from Memphis to Greenville about 5.6 inches per mile, and from Greenville to Vicksburg about 4.2 inches per mile.
Below Vicksburg, the slope gradually flattens: roughly 4 inches per mile from Vicksburg to Natchez, 2.6 inches per mile from Natchez to Baton Rouge, 1.7 inches per mile between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, and about 2 inches per mile from New Orleans to the Gulf. Nimrod said that pattern shows a healthy fall down to Natchez and then a physical “problem” reach where the river slows, encouraging sediment to settle, especially where flow is being siphoned at Old River.
Atchafalaya risks if river jumps
Nimrod acknowledged that if the main river ever abandoned its current course and followed the Atchafalaya, the consequences for South Louisiana would be severe, a point Williams highlights in his writing. The Atchafalaya route from Old River to the Gulf is only about 150 miles, with an average slope he estimated around 5.2 inches per mile, meaning water would fall more steeply and deliver higher stages into an already flood-prone basin.
At Simmesport on the Atchafalaya, flood stage is about 40 feet and the record stage reached 59 feet in 1927; Nimrod said a full river capture could push “normal” flood stages there into the low 50s, badly outstripping levee designs. In Morgan City, where flood stage is 6 feet and the record crest is just over 10 feet from 1973, Nimrod said modeling suggests a full capture could drive typical high water to around 12 feet, putting the city effectively under water and leaving New Orleans and Baton Rouge with drastically reduced flows.
The 3T lawsuit and its collapse
Nimrod devoted part of his talk to the high-profile “3T” takings lawsuit Williams helped spur against the United States over river flooding. On Feb. 11, 2019, the state of Mississippi filed a complaint in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims seeking about $25 million for alleged unconstitutional takings on roughly 8,000 acres of 16th Section lands along the Mississippi River.
Four days later, Williams filed his own claim for about $35 million over flooding and siltation on his 8,792-acre Lake Mary plantation, and he and attorney Don Barrett then recruited riverside hunting clubs — including well-known Mississippi batture clubs — into a class-style action that eventually covered around 200,000 acres. Landowners could pay roughly $10 per acre to share about two-thirds of any recovery, or pay nothing up front in exchange for a smaller percentage if the plaintiffs won; Nimrod said many clubs signed on, though some refused on principle.
Court rulings and what they mean
In 2020, the Corps sought to dismiss the case as frivolous, but Judge Elaine Kaplan allowed it to proceed, turning what Nimrod described as a $3 trillion exposure on paper into a serious concern for federal flood control operations. Over the next several years, the parties completed discovery, exchanged expert reports and added landowner complaints, with Barrett’s firm updating hunting clubs in late 2023 about progress and anticipated rulings.
On Sept. 17, 2024, Kaplan granted summary judgment for the government, holding that the bellwether plaintiffs’ claims fell outside the six-year statute of limitations for takings claims and dismissing the suit for lack of subject-matter jurisdiction. Nimrod said the ruling effectively ended the 3T case for the state, Williams and the participating clubs, and while the plaintiffs have appealed, he expects them to lose and called the decision a relief for the Corps, which he said has “done an excellent job” keeping the mandated 70–30 split every day.
New “doom and gloom” and a new proposal
Despite losing in court, Nimrod said Williams has returned to the opinion pages this year with another “More Flood for Less Rain” column, recycling the headline he used nearly a decade ago while updating his arguments. In the latest piece, Williams leans on a 2019 internal Corps “worst-case scenario” analysis that layers climate-change assumptions and extreme flows onto the Project Design Flood to suggest levees could overtop, forcing the river to Old River and the Atchafalaya.
Williams again blames Old River operations for about 75 percent of modern flood problems and only 25 percent on rainfall, according to Nimrod’s summary, and then returns to Old River as “the main culprit.” But this time, Nimrod said, Williams’ proposed solution is to build an entirely new control structure at roughly river mile 328, at Widow Graham Bend — just 13 miles upstream of the existing complex and a few miles above his Lake Mary property.
Short distance, big price tag
Nimrod said the Corps does not build billion-dollar control structures 13 miles apart on a 953-mile river and called the idea “short-sighted” and primarily aimed at protecting Williams’ $50 million batture asset. He warned that moving the diversion point upstream would merely shift the sediment plug upstream as well, worsening high-water conditions toward Natchez and potentially affecting Vicksburg over time instead of relieving them.
On one of his final slides, Nimrod spelled out a timeline: Williams owns 8,792 batture acres above Old River; in 2016 he pushed to send more water through Old River; in 2019 he led the lawsuit against the Corps; and in 2025 he is again warning of catastrophic failure while asking for a new structure “just above” his property. “He’s wrong,” Nimrod told the veterans, adding that once Williams advocates a fix that plainly benefits his own riverfront land first.
Where Nimrod agrees with Williams
Nimrod repeatedly stressed that Williams is not “all wrong” and said they agree that sedimentation below Old River is a serious and growing issue. He said Williams is correct that the hydropower plant’s design — taking most of its water from the outer, clearer part of the bend — and the small share of flow left in the sediment-rich inner channel mean the system is not moving enough sand and silt through the reach.
Under the plant’s license, the owner is supposed to dredge the Mississippi channel in front of the control structures if sediment begins to block them, but Nimrod said the power company has never dredged there and the Corps has never ordered them to do so. He said that, combined with continuous daily diversions that slow the main-channel velocity, is allowing the bottleneck below Old River to grow and may be contributing to higher relative flood stages at Natchez compared to Greenville.
Data pointing to trouble at Natchez
To test that suspicion, Nimrod said he personally compiled high-water records from 1973 through 2025 at Memphis, Greenville and Natchez, calculating how far above or below flood stage each crest was and comparing those values to Greenville’s. Over time, his numbers show Memphis experiencing about 1.27 feet less relative flooding than Greenville since the 2011 flood, while Natchez has seen about 2.4 feet more relative flooding over the same period.
“That tells me there is a problem in Natchez,” Nimrod said, pointing again to the sediment plug below Old River as the likely culprit, not climate change alone or some immediate failure of the levee system. He argued the priority should be “getting rid of the plug” through better sediment management, rather than moving the control structure or dramatically changing the congressionally mandated flow split.
Possible fixes: dredging and “flushing”
Nimrod told the veterans he does not have a complete answer but laid out two broad strategies he believes deserve serious consideration. First, he said the hydropower operator must be forced to begin dredging in front of the Old River structures, with the Corps helping coordinate and, where possible, reusing dredged material to build ports, pads and industrial sites the way Greenville’s port was built on dredged sand.
Second, he urged the Corps to consider periodic “flushing” operations at Old River, temporarily shutting down diversions through the control structures and hydro plant to allow 100 percent of the flow to stay in the Mississippi channel for short periods to scour out accumulated sediment. Diverting water every day slows velocity and encourages deposition, he said, while occasional full-flow pulses might restore some of the river’s natural self-cleaning ability below Old River without changing the long-term 70–30 balance.
A warning, not a panic
Nimrod said the fact that Natchez is seeing more relative flooding while Memphis is seeing less shows the system below Greenville is under stress, and he urged action “now” before the plug grows to the point that Vicksburg and the Delta begin to feel its effects. At the same time, he pushed back on what he called “doom and gloom” narratives, stressing that the existing levee system and Old River complex have performed as designed for decades and that the Corps has scrupulously maintained the 70–30 split.
“People are reading the paper,” Nimrod said, nodding toward the DD-T editor in the room and noting that even the latest op-eds were sent to him for technical review before publication. He said Williams’ columns are “exciting” and “scary” enough to grab attention, but he urged veterans and Delta residents to separate the valid concerns about sediment from alarmist claims that the entire Mississippi River system is on the verge of imminent collapse.
This report was compiled with the assistance of Perplexity AI.
