The Richton Salt Dome Blues
December 4th 2007
Since the first opinion piece appeared in the Mississippi Press, the Richton Salt Dome proposal has started to attract attention from many quarters. I think the concept of diverting fifty MILLION gallons of water per day sort of makes you sit up and take notice. I’m sure that Atlanta could find something to do that water. The Sun Herald has had daily articles. The Hattiesburg American and Clarion Ledger have both picked up the pace of coverage. Red Orbit.com has been reprinting the Sun Herald stories. I hope that this coverage continues.
This new attention to the story has already brought out some interesting facts: If you’re feeling puzzled because you don’t remember the announcement of the environmental impact study, it may be because it was announced on the Thursday after Katrina hit. And, what about the public hearings for the the study? Did you just miss that announcement in the paper, like I did? Or maybe it was because that since our meeting places were damaged by Katrina the Pascagoula and Hattiesburg meetings were held in Jackson! But don’t feel bad—they didn’t bother telling the Jackson County board of supervisors, either. I don’t know if the Forrest County supervisors have heard anything to this day. Doesn’t this sound like the old days of dragline and dam it politics by the Corps of Engineers.
Friend, fellow Birding Committee member, and part time resident on the lower Pascagoula, Grayson Rayborn has some interesting takes on the issue which he shared in a recent email:
The recent Hattiesburg American article left some questions unanswered. As I remember it quote someone as saying the diversion of water only amounted to about 1/24 th of the Pascagoula average flow. I went to a web site and calculate using current flow numbers a diversion at fifty million per day of more than seven per cent of the flow at Merrill (the start of the Pascagoula where the Leaf and Chickasawhay join). Although 7% doesn’t seem like much it would seem to be enough to make fairly significant changes in the River. What happens if the drought worsens? The wetlands could be put at risk and the fifty million gallons a day could then be crucial. That’s a lot of water. WLOX news recently suggested that fifty thousand cars a day (as I remember their number) traveled US 90 in Biloxi. Each vehicle on that busy highway would need to tow a trailer carrying nineteen 55 gallon drums behind it to equal the flow that is proposed for diversion. And why was the idea of diverting the water from the Pascagoula instead of the Leaf considered such an advance? The Leaf, with the Chicasawhay, becomes the Pascagoula so the diversion would affect the lower watershed much the same whether it was taken from the Leaf or the Pascagoula. The only difference is that it would upset residents living near the salt dome less if it is taken from farther away.
This is not the first time that the Richton Salt Dome has been shopped around. In the early 80’s the dome was seriously considered as a nuclear waste repository. Back then a grass-roots group formed to oppose the project, the Perry County Citizens Against Nuclear Disposal, or PC-CAND. At the time oil or gas storage seemed to be a great alternative to nuclear waste. Now here we are, facing the reality of just how dirty this process can be. It seems that a salt dome untapped is just like a river un-dammed: Some people just can’t let either one be. One more cheerful note, back there in the last millennium, one of the selling points of the Richton Salt Dome’s development was the existence of another similar dome close by, the Cypress Creek Dome.
