State Gazette (TN) - Efforts are underway -- again -- to make the West Tennessee Tributaries Project more environmentally friendly.  The old flood control project focused on channelizing the rivers. Waterways were straightened, made deeper and essentially turned into glorified drainage ditches.

The old WTTP was high-maintenance, but it worked. In fact it worked so well that it drained wetlands along the rivers. That led to a lawsuit that brought the project to a halt more than three decades ago.  A governor's task force was appointed in 1992 to reformulate the WTTP. The group developed a mission plan that called for restoring the natural river meanders and removing floodplain obstructions, such as levees, ponds lined with geomembranes wherever possible. Everyone agreed to the concept, but political wrangling prevented its implementation.  The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers attempted to establish pilot projects testing those ideas on the Obion and Forked Deer Rivers have been thwarted either by politics or by economics. Last year, the Corps and the West Tennessee River Basin Authority worked together to find a suitable spot for a pilot project. They analyzed nine locations, but none qualified through the Corps' benefit-cost ratio -- at least not under the existing project.  Basin Authority Executive Director David Salyers said all of the potential pilot projects were located on the Obion River, the only place where work can begin until the Corps buys more mitigation land. None of those locations had enough flood-linked timber and crop damage to meet the benefit-cost ratio, he said.