--- title: The Mississippi River Gulf Outlet | TIME description: How the creation of a shipping channel ultimately led to the destruction of the New Orleans coastline canonical: https://time.com/video/HEy2IMPc/ og:title: The Mississippi River Gulf Outlet og:description: How the creation of a shipping channel ultimately led to the destruction of the New Orleans coastline og:url: https://time.com/video/HEy2IMPc/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/HEy2IMPc/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: The Mississippi River Gulf Outlet twitter:description: How the creation of a shipping channel ultimately led to the destruction of the New Orleans coastline twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/HEy2IMPc/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # The Mississippi River Gulf Outlet > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: The Mississippi River Gulf Outlet [Watch (HLS stream): The Mississippi River Gulf Outlet](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/HEy2IMPc.m3u8) (2:48)  _Published 2007-08-02. How the creation of a shipping channel ultimately led to the destruction of the New Orleans coastline_ --- Jul 25, 2023 4:22 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [Mississippi River Breaks 1993 Flood Record West of Chicago](/video/H1xEcjMY/) ### Mississippi River Breaks 1993 Flood Record West of Chicago [Watch The Savanna-Sabula Bridge Implode Over the Mississippi River](/video/LN9G4Lug/) ### Watch The Savanna-Sabula Bridge Implode Over the Mississippi River [Mississippi River in New Orleans](/video/rdPsc7fJ/) ### Mississippi River in New Orleans --- ## Transcript >> So this used to be healthy marsh and cypress forest, but now it's the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet or MRGO. It was a shipping channel dug by the Army Corps of Engineers in the mid- 60s to give ships a shortcut to the port of New Orleans. It's been abysmal failure as a shipping channel. Ships hardly ever use it, but it's been absolutely terrific when it comes to destroying wetlands. Thanks to the saltwater intrusion and the erosion of its banks. It's now about 3 times as wide as it used to be. And it's directly destroyed about 30, 000 acres of wetlands while kinda screwing up another 600, 000. Those are wetlands that used to provide storm protection for the city of New Orleans through mother nature's way as opposed to the levees that failed. >> Storm starts to flow as faster through open water than over the marsh. So, 2 thing happened. It had more open water- that means less friction, so more stones are to gonna go faster. That's exactly what is happening right now. But why are you seeing this new armoring's that concretes and stones and placed here in both side of the gate? Both places we had- we had [ unk ] while failure and levee bridge and bridge was so bad-- at the water from this channel actually created a 55- feet deep channel that rushed water into St. Bernard as the Lower Ninth Ward area. >> Basically, from this levee, all the way to the distant free lawn several miles away was once a vast cypress forest. When they dug the MRGO, it allowed saltwater intrusion in it and it killed the remaining trees and has prevented the cypress from regrowing. There's pretty good consensus now that the cypress trees in particular which is what we had here are probably the best type of wetlands to buffer storm surge. >> Now that the Army Corps of Engineers in State of Louisiana are thinking about building levees sort of- all the way across the state, and what are the sort of lessons that you can learn from what happens when you, you know, when you- when you cut cypress and marsh off from their natural hydrology? >> Louisiana's wetlands-- virtually all of those wetlands are part of a very large estuary. And they're dependent on having a gradient of saltwater to freshwater. Levees, large channels like the MRGO- they interrupt that- that natural gradient and in this case, put much higher salinity in an area that should be fresh and the vegetation cannot withstand that- that high salinities, so the vegetation dies. You know, the new alignments we're looking at- some of those in fact probably are going to recreate some of the problems we've had in the past. There's a lot of very good [ unk ] we think to put- to have levees, but have the levees for the back where the people are and put the wet ones or leave the wet ones in front of the levees. ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"The Mississippi River Gulf Outlet","description":"How the creation of a shipping channel ultimately led to the destruction of the New Orleans coastline","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/HEy2IMPc/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2007-08-02T23:23:06.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/HEy2IMPc.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/video/HEy2IMPc/","duration":"PT2M48S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/video/HEy2IMPc/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}} ```