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001184 levee on the west bank, a 10.3-mile levee on the east bank, and a 5-mile channel improvement with a 2.3-mile cutoff to lead the river between the levees. It was begun by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 1964, com- pleted in 1968, and cost $8 million in federal funds and $1 million in local dollars. It was intended to accommodate a flood of a magnitude that hypotheti- cally would occur only once in every 175 years. It didn't, as time soon told. But meanwhile, everyone was very optimistic that it would: the Flood Control Dis- trict's president said, "This project will make many, many acres of valuable land secure for home, business, and industrial use"; a Major General of the Army Corps of Engineers said, "There is no reason why the project should not give indefinite protection from flooding to the area"; and the people started building, feeling secure in the protec- tion of the recent flood control project combined with the dam upstream (Fig. 14). The local authorities did nothing to sto p them. Far from seeking to prevent floodplain encroachment, each local jurisdiction-Jackson on the west bank and Flowood, Richland, Pearl, and Rankin County to the east-did its ut- most to attract new development regard- less of flood hazard. An example: all of the land bordering the Pearl in Jackson was zoned residential or commercial; the Pearl and its local tributaries were not identified as constraining land use, nor was there any distinction between lands inside or outside the levee. On the east side of the river, land use manage- ment of the floodplain was lacking altogether. There, development both within and outside the levee proceeded without any zoning at all. There were a few minor cautions about floodplain development: (1) in its 1973 F100d Plain Report, the Corps of Engineers did note that several northern Jackson subdivisions infringed on flood lands, but it did not go on to criticize Jackson's zoning law, and its tone about the unlikelihood of a major flood was generally complacent; (2) the Jackson city council did adopt a 1974 resolution that building permit applications should be reviewed for their consistency with the need to minimize flood damage and for recommended construction changes in flood hazard locations, but this resolu- tion was passed primarily to qualify Jackson for the "emergency phase" of the National F100d Insurance Program, and enforcement was by visual inspec- tion only; and (3) in 1978, the Central Mississippi Planning and Development District-the A-95 review agency for the region-did include in its general land plan for Rankin County the advice that the county should adopt zoning to re- strict inappropriate floodplain develop- ment, but the advice came late, has not been followed even yet, and was not similarly directed to municipalities of Pearl, Richland, and F1owood, who also needed it. All three acknowledgments of flood danger were simply token ges- tures: pebbles in the path of a surging tide. The Ross Barnett Dam likewise proved no defense against the '79 flood. Completed in the early 1960's, this dam at the northeast corner of Jackson was built by the then newly-organized five- county Water Supply District using local taxes and land sale revenues. It was in- tended mainly for water supply and rec- reation, although an ancillary purpose was to reduce downstream flooding by providing a modest storage capacity. It was not, however, a flood control proj- ect-to have served as such, its reservoir would have to have been kept at a level too low for maximum recreation use and shoreline development. With adequate flood warning, the level could have been dropped by phased releases to accommo- date arriving floodwaters. But three fed- eral agencies-the Corps, National Weather Service, and the U.S. Geological Survey-aIl gave different predictions of flood conditions, and all were too low. As a result, releases from the dam were too delayed to reduce the flood crest at Jackson very much. The 1979 Flood: Inundation and Mitigation The week before Easter in 1979 it started to rain. And it rained. By Thurs- day, April 12, Jackson was disrupted by local flash floods and the Pearl was rising ominously. By Sunday, they knew it was going way past the 1961 level, and the water continued to rise. It finally crested on Tuesday, April 17 , at 43.25 ft., with a 30