N.O. residents wary of vow to plug MRGO

• By ALLEN M. JOHNSON JR.
• Advocate New Orleans bureau
• Published: Aug 7, 2008 - Page: 14A - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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NEW ORLEANS — Two blocks from the Lower 9th Ward home of legendary performer Fats Domino, more than a dozen sign-waving activists Tuesday called for the closing of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet Canal.

“Mister Go Must Go!” protester Katie Del Guerico, 26, of Chatham, N.J., yelled at a busy intersection. Passing motorists honked and waved. Some stopped and asked for decals or anti-MRGO yard signs.

MRGO’s days seem numbered. However, New Orleans area residents are wary.

Authorized by federal law 50 years ago, the 75-mile channel from the Gulf of Mexico to the Intracoastal Canal has been blamed for deadly flooding of the Lower 9th Ward and neighboring St. Bernard Parish, during Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

During his 2006 campaign for Congress, Gov. Bobby Jindal derided the MRGO as a “hurricane highway” that “never realized its economic potential,” even before Katrina.

On June 5, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers officially “de-authorized” the 75-mile shipping channel. The corps plans to construct a bank-to-bank “plug” in the canal just south of Bayou La Loutre near Hopedale.

Designed to give shipping merchants a shorter route from the Gulf of Mexico to the Port of New Orleans, the burden of environmental problems and costly dredging has eroded political support for MRGO, Sierra Club organizer Darryl Malek-Wiley said.

“The problem we have is the damn dam is not enough,” Malek-Wiley, said during Wednesday’s demonstration. “The U.S. government needs to pay to restore the cypress swamps and coastal wetlands that were destroyed to build MRGO — built between 1958 and 1968.

Wiping sweat from his forehead, he then added: “The dam will not shut down the ‘hurricane highway’ either.”

A corps expert did not disagree Wednesday.

“The closure at Bayou La Loutre is not a feature of the hurricane protection system,” said Greg Miller, a wetlands expert and project manager for MRGO at the corps headquarters in New Orleans.

The separate construction of corps gates at the Inner Harbor Navigational Canal and Bayou Bienvenu are designed to protect the area from future storm surges — along with refortification of the area levee systems, corps officials say.  

Shutting down the channel is “an important first step” to restoration of the wetlands, which are credited as nature’s barriers to hurricanes, Miller said.