Talk:Mississippi River–Gulf Outlet Canal

message: is the mississippi river-gulf outlet man made and what effects did or has cuased when dealing with the impact of the hurrican
: Yes, and take a look at the article and link. Cheers, -- Infrogmation
: Yes, It was authorized by Congress in 1956 and built between 1958 and 1965 at a cost of $92 million.  The Corps' Interagency Performance Evaluation Team (IPET)  and the American Society of Civil Engineers External Review Panel concluded that the MRGO had very little actual impact on the storm surge from Katrina.  Regardless, during the week of December 18, 2006 the US Army Corps of Engineers told Congress   that "Based on the current level of analysis, closure of the MRGO channel to both shallow and deep-draft navigation by an armored earthen dam appears to be particularly viable," and "Additional measures to provide oppurtunities for hurricane storm surge protection and ecosystem restoration may complement MRGO channel closure, including wetland shoreline protection, freshwater diversion, and dedicated dredging for coastal habitat creation."Engr civil 15:17, 22 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Man made?

message: Here's a photo from the Paris Road Bridge. Not a very good one (alas I had to shoot blind from a moving car), but possibly of some reference until we have better illustrations. To the left is the Mississippi River and the Crescent City Connection Bridge. Center background are the skyscrapers of the New Orleans Central Business District. MRGO is in the center foreground, heading towards the Industrial Canal. -- Infrogmation 17:34, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Images

message: "Long before this suburb west of New Orleans was shaken by Hurricane Katrina, it was notorious for its fierce political infighting, for name-calling and mudslinging, for charges and countercharges of cronyism and corruption."
In Louisiana, Graft Inquiries Are Increasing
"But the city’s decline over the past three decades has left it impoverished and lacking the resources to build its economy from within. New Orleans can’t take care of itself even when it is not 80% under water; what is it going to do now, as waters continue to cripple it, and thousands of looters systematically destroy what Katrina left unscathed?"
Will New Orleans Recover?
"A year ago Total Community Action, an anti-poverty activist group in New Orleans, issued a devastating whitepaper that warned that poverty in the city had reached epidemic proportions. This was not another anti-establishment grouse by a fringe group of activists. The figures on the city’s poverty were appalling. The poverty rate was nearly triple that of the national average. More than 40 percent of public school kids were illiterate, and half would drop out before graduation. Many of them would wind up in Angola state prison, an antique facility that, in a throwback to an Old South plantation, forces inmates to do manual farm labor at peon wages."
The Real Reasons New Orleans Is So Poor
"Sure, New Orleans regularly leads the league in all the wrong categories. It's been the fattest city, the most corrupt city, the most murderous city, and so forth."
Notes from Under Water 
"New Orleans also has some unique leadership problems. The city is one of the most corrupt in the nation. Residents consider themselves survivors not only of the climate and weather, but also their own elected officials. The police force often provides ugly headlines about corrupt cops, and other city officials aren’t much better. It is a wild and lawless city even in the best of times. The murder rate in the city is one of the highest in the nation, ten times the national average, and higher than many cities in Iraq."
"Rather than handing over the reconstruction to the same corrupt elite that failed the city so spectacularly, the effort could be led by groups like Douglass Community Coalition"
Let the People Rebuild New Orleans
"New Orleans, top to bottom, was the most corrupt city I ever lived in."
[www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/720343/posts (New Orleans) City Hall corruption sweep begins]
"The corruption in city hall was horrible, and it was the same thing at the levee board," Peggy Wilson told Cybercast News Service.  "The corruption in Louisiana and in the City of New Orleans goes down to the bone."
New Orleans Corrupt 'Down to the Bone,' Former Pol Charges
"What left so many at the mercy of Katrina was poverty. In the greater New Orleans area, 65,000 minority residents lived in poverty before Katrina, compared with 85,000 whites. "
The Hurricane Hit That Hit the Poor
"The FBI says Louisiana last year ranked third in the nation in public corruption cases"
Why is Louisiana so poor?
"New Orleans is still the lowest paid department"
2006 POLICEPAY Index Just Released
"New Orleans is always at or near the top in the national ranking for murder rate. The rate of murders per thousand residents there has been ten times the national average in recent years. This high murder rate cannot be explained by poverty, and demographics. New Orleans’ murder rate is also ten times as high as New York City’s, a city once thought ungovernable, which also has a large majority of non-white residents."
"But the city, in which corruption and crime has always been rampant, was unusually ill equipped to deal with the kind of  catastrophe."
[www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1478664/posts New Orleans myths: The numbers tell a different story]
Is New Orleans changing colors?
"The North Shore region is NOT Baton Rouge and NOT New Orleans"
Understand the Recruitment and Retention Needs and Challenges of the New Orleans Police Department
"New Orleans is among the bottom fourth of 200 U.S. metro areas in a ranking of the country's best performing cities."
New Orleans is No. 167 in 'Best Cities' list
"By almost every statistical measure, New Orleans is a bad place to be poor. Half the city's households make less than $28,000 a year, and 28% of the population lives in poverty.
In the late 1990s, the state's school systems ranked dead last in the nation in the number of computers per student (1 per 88), and Louisiana has the nation's second-highest percentage of adults who never finished high school. By the state's own measure, 47% of the public schools in New Orleans rank as "academically unacceptable."
And Louisiana is the only one of the 50 states where the state legislature doesn't allocate money to pay for the legal defense of indigent defendants. The Associated Press reported this year that it's not unusual for poor people charged with crimes to stay in jail for nine months before getting a lawyer appointed.
These government failures are not merely a matter of incompetence. Louisiana and New Orleans have a long, well-known reputation for corruption: as former congressman Billy Tauzin once put it, "half of Louisiana is under water and the other half is under indictment."
That's putting it mildly. Adjusted for population size, the state ranks third in the number of elected officials convicted of crimes (Mississippi is No. 1). Recent scandals include the conviction of 14 state judges and an FBI raid on the business and personal files of a Louisiana congressman."
Why we couldn’t save the people of New Orleans
"On the other hand, Houston is a nagging example of the prosperous city New Orleans could have become, but probably never will."
New Orleans: I Have Seen the Future, and It's Houston
"New Orleans has one of the highest murder rates in the country. By mid-August of this year, 192 murders had been committed in New Orleans, 'nearly 10 times the national average,"
"The Sept. 4 New York Daily News reported "Louisiana and New Orleans have a long, well-known reputation for corruption... Adjusted for population size, the state ranks third in the number of elected officials convicted of crimes"
New Orleans City Council President: 'Maybe God's Going To Cleanse Us'
"The city has a 40% illiteracy rate, and over 50% of black ninth graders will not graduate in four years.  Louisiana spends on average $4,724 per child's education and ranks 48th in the country for lowest teacher salaries. The equivalent of more than two classrooms of young people drop out of Louisiana schools every day and about 50,000 students are absent from school on any given day.  Far too many young black men from New Orleans end up enslaved in Angola Prison, a former slave plantation where  inmates still do manual farm labor, and over 90% of inmates eventually die in the prison.  It is a city where industry has left, and most remaining jobs are are low-paying, transient, insecure jobs in the service economy."
"Louisiana politics is famously corrupt, but with the tragedies of this week our political leaders have defined a new level of incompetence"
Notes From Inside New Orleans
"New Orleans is, and for a long time has been, the opposite of a city that works. It perennially ranks near the bottom on practically every basic measure of civic health."
IN THE RUINS
"but those efforts could be undermined by forces that have long beset the city -- a tradition of corruption and dysfunction and a weak economy that clouded New Orleans's future years before the rains began in August."
[www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1519259/posts Burdens of Past Limit New Orleans's Future]
"New Orleans has one of the highest poverty rates of any of America’s big cities. According to a report by Total Community Action, a New Orleans public advocacy group, nearly one out of three New Orleans residents live below the poverty level, the majority of who are black. A spokesperson for the United Negro College Fund noted that the city’s poor live in some of the most dilapidated, and deteriorated housing in the nation."
Looting New Orleans and America's Poverty Crisis
"The second job is less obvious. New Orleans’s immutable civic shame, before and after Katrina, is not racism, poverty, or inequality, but murder—a culture of murder so vicious and so pervasive that it terrorizes and numbs the whole city.
In 2003, New Orleans’s murder rate was nearly eight times the national average—and since then, murder has increased. In 2002 and 2003, New Orleans had the highest per capita city homicide rate in the United States, with 59 people killed per year per 100,000 citizens—compared to New York City’s seven. New Orleans is a New York with nearly 5,000 murders a year—an unlivable place. The city’s economy has sputtered over the past generation partly because local and state officials have failed to do the most elementary job of government: to secure the personal safety of citizens."
Who's killing New Orleans by Nicole Gelinas, City Journal
"Gotham, economically and fiscally, is New Orleans' polar opposite. New Orleans has long had a weak economy and thus a weak tax base, while New York draws resources from some of the richest taxpayers in the world."
N.Y and New Orleans
"While many indicators regarding New Orleans' economy are disturbing at best, Reynolds finds plenty of positive impact resulting from the gentrification trend."
Best of New Orleans 09 30 03
"The ports of South Louisiana (POSL) and New Orleans, which run north and south of the city, are as important today as at any point during the history of the republic. On its own merit, POSL is the largest port in the United States by tonnage and the fifth-largest in the world. It exports more than 52 million tons a year, of which more than half are agricultural products—corn, soybeans, and so on. A large proportion of US agriculture flows out of the port. Even more cargo, nearly 69 million tons, comes in through the port—including not only crude oil, but chemicals and fertilizers, coal, concrete, and so on."
The Ghost City
:Pardon me, but what does any of this have to do with MRGO?
::Not much. This is material that was removed from the article. In controversial cases and in excising large amounts of material from an article, it's considered courteous to paste it on the talk page to make it easy for people to discuss it. Dpbsmith (talk) 10:07, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: NEW ORLEANS: A CORRUPT CITY, ACCIDENT WAITING TO HAPPEN

message: I'm taking the liberty of interspersing bolded comments throughout this section to show the contributor why it gets repeatedly removed. --jpgordon∇∆∇∆ 01:08, 15 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: MR-GO and the Port of New Orleans Ship Traffic Examined in DETAIL

message: This section, previously titled with the rhetorical question "IS MR-GO a FAILURE or is it the PORT OF NEW ORLEANS the REAL CULPRIT", has serious neutrality problems. It is essentially an editorial and is taking a specific point of view. 
The section does contains two references to facts. But some significant facts in this section are also unsourced: "Long Beach, California have around 50 robotic assisted cranes to quickly unload ships where as ports such a New Orleans only have 4," and "the costs of pilots navigating the Mississippi river are some of the highest in America." 
The serious problem is that most of the statements in the section are opinions ("New Orleans itself has not been a great place to do business," "the Port of New Orleans as well as the surrounding city has been viewed as a corrupt and crime ridden city," and "It could be said that, 'it's not that shipping companies don't use MR-GO, it's that shipping companies don't like to use the Port of New Orleans or do business with the city of New Orleans or Louisiana.'"
Unfortunately, these opinions are not attributed to any sources and do not meet Wikipedia's verifiability policy. 
If this section is to be kept, it needs to be provided with source citations that put these opinions in the mouths of authorities who are well enough known for a reader to be able to judge their reliability. Dpbsmith (talk) 00:24, 25 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  MR-GO and the Port of New Orleans 

message: Dear ANON: please LEARN to post without SCREAMING in RANDOM CAPITALS. It looks WACKY  AND dErAngeD.  Thanks, -- Infrogmation 03:43, 16 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Sheesh

message: I removed all the items that have remained unsourced for weeks. After I did this, this is the material that was left:
:Criticism of the MR-GO and the Port of New Orleans
:In 2003, New Orleans had 255,374 shipping containers while nearby Houston had 1,024,755 shipping containers pass through. U.S. Waterborne Container Traffic by Port/Waterway in 2003 While the Port of New Orleans is often said to be the 4th largest in the U.S., this is true only when measured in "tonnage," not "containers". The ship traffic going though the Port of New Orleans is mainly grain, coal , and oil; a heavy type of shipment as compared to much more expensive TV's, computers, etc. (See also Half of nations grain exports Port of South Louisiana)
:Port fees and assisted robotic container unloading cranes also affect whether a shipping company chooses the Port of New Orleans as its off loading destination. Ports such as Long Beach, California have around 50 robotic assisted cranes to quickly unload ships where as ports such a New Orleans only have 4. (See also U.S. Seaports: At the Crossroads of the Global Economy, Port of Long Beach stats, Port of Rotterdam, Port of New Orleans)
I dithered on whether or not to leave this remaining material. It's seems adequately sourced (I haven't checked the sources, though), but on the whole seems too pointless to retain. All the important points in the section are unsourced opinion.
A section that marshals published criticism of the Port of New Orleans that is relevant to MR-GO would be encyclopedic, but an unsourced editorial of plausible personal opinion is not. The issue, as always, is not whether the content is reasonable opinion, but whether it is traceable to a reliable published source. It may be, but it is the job of the contributor to provide that traceability. Dpbsmith (talk) 01:57, 17 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Reasons for removing the "Criticism" 

message: In regard to this statement:
:While one could easily mis-interprete the above statement that MR-GO is a failure, MR-GO should not be blamed for it's performance as the final destination, the Port and City of New Orleans and Louisiana is a area of economic decline as well as a significant population decline.
I asked for a source citation to a published source, expressing this opinion. In response, this was supplied: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2006/02/05/BUGG4H2FIB1.DTL. 
However, this reference does not mention MR-GO or New Orleans at all. That is verging on bad faith. It is not a proper citation as required by the verifiability policy. It is just a piece of supporting evidence for what I continue to see as 24.252.122.185's own opinion and original research. 
24.252.122.185, please read and understand Wikipedia's policies on verifiability, source citation, and WP:NPOV neutrality. Please stop trying to use this article as a dumping ground for a personal, though supportable attack on New Orleans and the Port of New Orleans. 
If you can find something like an editorial in a major newspaper that says specifically that MR-GO would succeed if properly managed, that would be relevant and could go in the article. So far, you not done this. Dpbsmith (talk) 11:59, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: However, businesses and the Army Corp of Engineers still recommend it's usage because this short cut saves time and money in the area of inexpensive shipping.
Once again, the purported reference—a very interesting read, by the way, almost creepy in its prescience—Gone with the Water by National Geographic does not mention MR-GO at all. It certainly does not say that businesses and Army Corps of Engineers still recommend its usage.
24.252.122.185, I'm very upset about your supplying "references" that do not actually bear any connection to the statements they are supposed to be supporting. Please do not do this again. Dpbsmith (talk) 14:16, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Snipping unsupported statements 

message: See List of world's busiest ports by cargo tonnage and my earlier edit summary to the main article. Ufwuct (talk) 01:51, 18 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: NOLA #9 worldwide, Houston #10

message: I have some outlines for major refactoring of this page.
The section MR-GO's disappointing performance and possible causes should be renamed to a non-neutral tone, such as Traffic of MR-GO.
I vote that we create a History section and put Role in Hurricane Katrina disaster as a subsection.  This way we can add Proposals for adding gates, general history, the closing to it.
The section MR-GO and the Port of New Orleans doesn't really mention anything about MR-GO, only the port of new orleans.  There is only one reference and it is a comparison of the Port of New Orleans and Houston.  But doesn't connect this information with MR-GO at all.  Also, the neutrality has been disputed for over a year now.
I vote removing the entire section.
Finally, I think we could add an Environmental Effects section as long as we can make sure it is a neutral section.
What does everybody think.  If noone disagrees I'll start this sometime in the next week.--Michael miceli (talk) 18:24, 31 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Major remodeling 

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I have just modified 2 external links on Mississippi River–Gulf Outlet Canal. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20060621221016/http://www.mvn.usace.army.mil/prj/ihnc/EvaluationReport/ihnc_eval.htm to http://www.mvn.usace.army.mil/prj/ihnc/EvaluationReport/ihnc_eval.htm
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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
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*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20120312073608/http://www.mrgo.gov/MRGO_History.aspx to http://www.mrgo.gov/MRGO_History.aspx
*Added  tag to http://www.stormsurge.lsu.edu/paperarticles/TheTimesPicayune_Oct24.pdf
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20060223113044/http://www.iwr.usace.army.mil/ndc/wcsc/by_porttons03.htm to http://www.iwr.usace.army.mil/ndc/wcsc/by_porttons03.htm
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thread_title:  External links modified (February 2018) 

message: I am not qualified to make the edit so I'll leave this for someone with topic knowledge and expertise.
Looking at
https://www.google.com/maps/@29.9951159,-89.9021183,12.57z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x8624070d724147b1:0x3227861012f649e5!8m2!3d30.1776975!4d-91.3189976
it appears that the following are in conflict with the article. I'm not knowledgeable on this; I'm just prompting possible corrections from someone who knows.
1. I-510 does not appear to cross the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway. I-510 seems to end before crossing any body of water.
2. If you hypothetically extend I-510 south from its apparent southern terminus on the link above, it would cross some body of water. However the MRGO appears to begin EAST of that point, not WEST.2600:6C56:6600:1ECF:3497:1A97:7363:9E26 (talk) 04:01, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Northern starting location seems incorrect