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The Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet Canal (also known as MRGO, MR-GO or "Mr. Go") is a 66 mile (106 km) channel that provides a shorter route to New Orleans' inner harbor for deep-draft vessels that cannot fit through the Industrial Canal Lock. The canal extends northwest from deep water in the Gulf of Mexico to the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal at the Port of New Orleans. Authorization was provided by Congress in 1956 and construction was completed in 1965. New Orleans is the largest city in the state of Louisiana, United States of America. ...
Because of erosion, it was as much as three times as wide as originally constructed by 1989. When MR-GO was built, the channel was 650 feet wide at the surface, but banks have eroded so that the average width is now 1,500 feet.
The outlet has never drawn expected traffic levels. Traffic along the MR-GO averages about one vessel per day, about 15 percent of the Port of New Orleans total traffic. Prior to Hurricane Katrina, many environmentalists called for its closure. Criticism intensified following the hurricane, when engineers implicated MR-GO in the failure of levees and floodwalls protecting New Orleans. Jump to: navigation, search Hurricane Katrina was the eleventh named tropical storm, fourth hurricane, third major hurricane, and first Category 5 hurricane of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season. ...
Three months before Katrina, Hassan Mashriqui, a storm surge expert at LSU's Hurricane Center, called MR-GO a "critical and fundamental flaw" in the Corps' hurricane defenses, a "Trojan Horse" that could amplify storm surges 20 to 40 percent. Following the storm, an engineering investigation and computer modelling showed that the outlet intensified the initial surge by 20 percent, raised the height of the wall of water about three feet, and increased the velocity of the surge from 3 feet per second to 8 feet per second in the funnel. Mashriqui believes this contributed to the scouring that undermined the levees and floodwalls along the outlet and Industrial Canal. "Without MRGO, the flooding would have been much less," he said. "The levees might have overtopped, but they wouldn't have been washed away." The Army Corps of Engineers disputes this causality and maintains Katrina would have overwhelmed the levees with or without the contributing effect of MR-GO.[1]
The storm deposited twenty feet of silt in MR-GO, rendering it unusable until it is dredged. Officials of St. Bernard Parish oppose its reopening. Others have called for re-opening it but equipping it with protective floodgates, or accelerating construction of the Inner Harbor Navigational Canal lock project, which when completed would allow MR-GO to be closed without affecting commercial traffic.[2]
Notes - ^ Investigators Link Levee Failures to Design Flaws; Three Teams of Engineers Find Weakened Soil, Navigation Canal Contributed to La. Collapses. The Washington Post, October 24, 2005
- ^ Katrina may mean MR-GO has to go New Orleans Times-Picayune, October 24, 2005
Jump to: navigation, search The Washington Post is the largest and oldest newspaper in Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States. ...
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