You can park your car and walk around on the proposed site of the world's largest hydraulic pumping plant. It's a short drive out of Viclcsburg, on the Yazoo River, near where it flows into the Mississippi. There's not a lot to look at. Endless acres of gently undulating farmland drift off towards a hazy horizon. It is hard to imagine what it must be like in a flood, when the pressure of water surging down the Mississippi is so great that it actually prevents the Yazoo from flowing forwards. When the levee at Mounds Landing, not very far from here, broke during the great flood of 1927, it sent water cresting over the roofs of houses in Yazoo City, 75 miles away. The Yazoo pump is meant to prevent flooding under less extreme conditions than those of 1927. Building it is a job for the Army Corps of Engineers. This week, the embattled federal agency―which is responsible for the nation's dams, locks, barge channels and flood-control systems―was the subj ect of a quietly momentous Senate hearing. "I'm willing to state categorically that the corps must change," said its military boss, Lieutenant-General Robert Flowers.
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