Industrial Canal Dedication
1923
From the UPI press release May 5, 1923:  "150,000 help celebrate opening of New Orleans' Industrial
Canal - 16 guns saluted from warships as Gov. Parker and party viewed the pageant on the Mississippi
from a yacht.  The new canal is to create an industrial zone for the factories, warehouses and other
industries.  It is 5 1/3 miles long, cost $20,000,000 and can pass ships of 10,000 tons, drawing 30 feet
of water.  It was begun June 6, 1918 and completed to navigability last February."
The Industrial Canal is a deep water shipping channel between the Mississippi River and Lake
Pontchartrain.  When work started on the canal in 1918, many buildings, especially in the built-up area
around the river, had to be demolished to make way for the canal.  One of these buildings was the old
Dauphine Street Ursuline Convent, which was almost a hundred years old at that time.
In 2005, the storm surge that was funneled by the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet - a channel constructed by
the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in the 1960's - into the Industriral Canal created multiple breaches in its
floodwalls, including a spectacular failure of 1/4 mile length on the Lower 9th Ward side of the canal.  The
canal waters poured through two breaches on the Upper Lower 9th Ward side, as well.  This, in combination
with multiple engineering failures in other Corps of Engineers' levees in the city, caused catastrophic
flooding in the New Orleans-Metro area.  Because of its contribution to the flooding of the city, the
Mississippi River Gulf Outlet was permanently closed and a surge barrier was put in place in 2009.