The Big Sunflower River is a tributary of the Yazoo, and has shipping, and commerce. The United States Army Corps of Engineers has maintained a navigation channel, which is thirty miles in length.
Description of The river
The Big Sunflower rises in a swamp southwest of Greenville, Mississippi. It winds south, with the Mississippi River to the west, and the Yazoo to the east, its watershed is somewhat limited.
Navigational Use
In 1976, the Army Corps Of Engineers ordered a channel dredged, this channel would be for use by barges, and pleasure craft. At thirty miles in length, private barge companies such as LAbarge have set up offices on the river.
Water Quality
Like the Yazoo, this river is very silt laden. The river gets its mud from the various bayous, and small streams that feed into it. The river has a distinct "Clear-Mud Line" where it meets the Yazoo, this shows that the Big Sunflower is muddier than the Yazoo.
The $62.5 million BigSunflowerRiver "Maintenance" project and the proposed $191 million Yazoo Backwater Pumps are designed to speed drainage of floodwaters in areas with low-lying agricultural land.
The re-suspension of DDT and toxaphene-contaminated sediment caused by dredging the BigSunflowerRiver would be a health risk to the subsistence, commercial and recreational anglers that fish the BigSunflower and connected rivers.
Dredging the River also would devastate the river's instream habitat, destroy at least 43 percent of the river's abundant mussel beds, and damage more than 3,600 acres of wetlands that are also in harm's way from the Pumps.
Construction of the BigSunflowerRiver and Tributaries Project was initiated in the late 1940's and completed in the 1960's.
It is interesting to note that the highest concentration of mussels currently found in the BigSunflowerRiver are located in reaches that had been modified during the original project through channel excavation, which re-moved sediment and provided a firmer bot-tom for better mussel recruitment.
The National Wildlife Federation challenged the BigSunflowerRiver Maintenance Project in the Federal District Court of Washington, D.C., contending that cost sharing should apply to the work and that the Corps of Engineers had failed to meet the requirements of NEPA by not adequately considering a non-structural alternative to the project.
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