On Thanksgiving Day, 2024, Anderson Jones had something to be grateful for. He finally made it home.
Five years prior, the sandbag levee protecting his family home failed. When the rising floodwaters in Mississippi’s Yazoo Backwater seeped past the barrier, it marked the starting line of a long journey to rebuild.
“It’s been a little while, but I made it back,” said Jones, 65, who grew up riding horses and trapping animals with his mother in the agricultural area about an hour outside of Vicksburg, Miss. “There’s no place like home.”
Today, his little house is painted a pretty shade of light blue that stands out against the cornfields and thick stands of trees. In the living room, pictures of his kids hang on the wall: a lifetime of memories.
It was a very different scene in 2019.
The house was underwater for six months until the Yazoo Backwater flood receded. In that time, it swamped more than half a million acres and destroyed nearly 700 homes.
The 2019 flood was historic, but this part of Mississippi is prone to flooding. When the Mississippi River is at flood stage, the Steele Bayou drainage gates stay closed to keep the river from backing up onto farms and homes.
But when the gates are closed, rainwater has no way to escape the Yazoo Backwater.
In 2019, when the Mississippi River stayed high for months, the water crept up and up until Jones’ home was destroyed. The flood swamped his septic tank and forced sewage back into the house. Mold carpeted every surface — the walls, the countertops, and the bedrooms where his son and daughter once slept were ruined.
“We tore the whole thing,” he said, “ripped everything out to the studs.”
The home cost $90,000 to rebuild, and insurance covered about two-thirds of it. Jones had to borrow the rest. Construction took years, with the contractor overworked and understaffed. Occasionally, another threat of high water delayed the work further.
“I had to be patient,” said Jones, who had to move in with his sister more than 70 miles away in Jackson.
It’s also not the first time the house has flooded. In 1973, high water pushed the family out. Jones said that the flood didn’t last as long, but the water was higher.
“It’s just been so many generations,” he said. “My daddy, me, now my children.”
This January, Jones and other residents in the Yazoo Backwater received news they’d been waiting years to hear.
The Army Corps of Engineers and other federal agencies agreed to move forward on a pumping project that had been in the works since Congress approved it in 1941. With the green light to move into the design stage, engineers are working on a plan to build pumps that would suck 25,000 cubic feet of water per second out of the Yazoo Backwater.
Conservation groups have been fighting the pumps for years. They say the vast amount of money it would take to build the pumps would be better spent raising homes and roads and returning low-lying farms back to their natural state. They fear the pumps will drain critical wetlands.
But for Jones, the pumps serve as an answer to the threat of climate change and the more intense rain and floods expected to come along with it.
“I get worried sometimes when it rains,” Jones said, “but since they say the pumps is on the way, that kind of eased my mind.”
He didn’t raise his home to prevent against future floods. Instead, he’s “banking on the Lord and the pumps.”
“You gonna have a lot of people telling you, ‘You need to move. Why you staying there?’ Because it’s our home,” he said. “I am going to stay right here.”
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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