Arkansas' Lake Chicot Represents an Environmental Tragedy Reversed

April 14, 1998


Arkansas' Lake Chicot Represents
An Environmental Tragedy Reversed
****
By Jim Taylor, travel writer
Arkansas Department of Parks and Tourism

(Editor's Note: This is the first of a two-part series on Arkansas' largest natural lake, Lake Chicot. This installment reviews the lake's environmental history. Part Two will examine the lake's renewed use as a recreational and scenic resource.)

LAKE VILLAGE -- When the turbulent Mississippi River changed course more than 500 years ago in what would become Chicot County, Arkansas, it left behind a separate, more serene natural wonder.

Twenty miles long and almost a mile across, Lake Chicot, a former main channel of the river, is the biggest oxbow lake in North America and Arkansas' largest natural lake. The stately cypresses and willows along its banks frame scenic vistas of waters unexpected in the flat, delta landscape of the state's southeastern corner.

Today, first-time visitors to the lake have no reason to suspect that its history in this century could best be characterized as an environmental tragedy with a happy ending.

In the early 1900s, Lake Chicot's pristine waters were known for their abundant populations of fish and game. They attracted visitors from throughout the nation. In the decades to follow, however, a series of seemingly unrelated environmental choices, all of which were viewed as beneficial for separate reasons, left the lake's waters as brown as coffee with cream, its fish and wildlife populations in decline.

The levees that rise up to 40 feet in height above the wetlands, and farm and cattle lands east of Lake Chicot, now protect the area from Mississippi floods such as those in 1912 and 1927 that inundated the town of Lake Village, on the western shore of the lake. Despite that benefit, they also represented the first environmental choice that led to the lake's problems.

Connerly Bayou, which penetrates the C-shaped lake's northwestern shore, is its primary tributary. Prior to the construction of the levees, the bayou's watershed consisted of about 40 square miles. The watershed was, however, destined for drastic changes of size and land use.

The new levees blocked the flow of numerous small streams that had previously emptied into the Mississippi. Thus came another environmental choice that would have benefits of its own but would impact Lake Chicot adversely.

In order to properly drain areas whose outlets to the Mississippi had been cut off, various channelization projects completed over the next few decades emptied water from those lands into Connerly Bayou, thus enlarging its watershed more than nine times, to about 360 square miles.

The centuries upon centuries the Mississippi spent meandering across its Delta region left the area with some of America's richest agricultural soil. The newly-enlarged Connerly Bayou watershed was no exception.

With that land now protected from the Mississippi and its drainage improved, most of the watershed was cleared of its wetland forests and converted to row-crop agriculture. The scale of the farming gained steam beginning in the 1920s, aided by the mechanization of agriculture. A power tractor was a vastly more efficient tool than a plow drawn by a horse or mule.

The intensive farming of the Connerly Bayou watershed was but a small part of the expansion of American agriculture that took place in this century. As such, it represented another environmental choice, seemingly unrelated to the future of Lake Chicot.

While these developments had been occurring, a change had also happened in the lake itself. When waters from the Great Flood of 1927 receded, they deposited a sand spit that, at times of low water, divided about one-fifth of the lake from its main body. The spit formed just east of Connerly Bayou's entrance to the lake.

The soils of the Mississippi's Delta are comprised of finely grained silts and clay. With their forest cover removed, the rainfall run-off from such areas frequently carries not only the water but suspended and dissolved particles of soil. In short, it's muddy.

Such became the case in the Connerly Bayou watershed. By 1948, the bayou was pouring so much sediment into Lake Chicot that the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission built a dike atop the sand spit to permanently divide the lake, thus protecting its northern basin from the bayou's waters.

In effect, Lake Chicot had become two separate lakes.

The sedimentation of the lower basin continued unabated. Studies done in the late 1970s indicated that it was taking on so much sediment that, despite its size, it would all but disappear in about 200 years.

No one had set out to ruin Lake Chicot, but ruin for its lower basin, approximately four-fifths of the lake, was well under way. The water across from Lake Village's downtown was no longer the attribute it had once been.

Lake Village officials decided something had to be done. By the early 1960s, they had won federal help. Congress authorized the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to begin planning a method of cleaning up the lake.

After extensive studies of the problem, the Corps decided to build a gated dam on Connerly Bayou to block its flow into Lake Chicot at times of high water. A new diversion channel would be constructed to transfer the bayou's muddy water into the Mississippi via a river cut-off known as Rowdy Bend.

For times when the Mississippi River stage was too high to allow the diverted water to flow on its own, the Corps would build a pumping station to send it on its way.

Since the bayou represented a main source of water for Lake Chicot (rainfall is the other), the Corps also would build a gated dam across Ditch Bayou, which flows out of the lake's southern end, to help stabilize the water levels in the lake.

The drive to clean up Lake Chicot represented yet another environmental choice. But would the Corps' plan work?

The Lake Chicot Pumping Plant, which began operating in 1985, is housed in an eight-story-tall building one-and-a-half times the size of a football field. Its pumps are powered by ten 3,100-horsepower electric motors and two 1,250-horsepower motors. The pumps can move 6,500 cubic feet (48,623 gallons) of water per second.

The pumping plant, its equipment, the diversion channel and the two dams cost in the neighborhood of $85 million, but the project worked so well that Lake Chicot is now classified as a clear-water lake. Its water quality and fisheries restored, the lake began attracting increased numbers of wildlife, sportsmen and vacationers.

In 1990, a portion of the dike that had divided the lake since 1948 was removed and replaced with a bridge. Once again, Lake Chicot is whole.

There will always be environmental choices affecting Lake Chicot, but those of the 1990s have been aimed at maximizing the recreational and scenic benefits of the lake, not inadvertently putting into motion and then preventing its demise.
 

Submitted by the Arkansas Department of Parks & Tourism
One Capitol Mall, Little Rock, AR 72201, (501) 682-7606
E-mail: info@arkansas.com

May be used without permission. Credit line is appreciated:
"Arkansas Department of Parks & Tourism"