20th century rendered the canal locks connecting the Industrial Canal to the Mississippi River obsolete; the MRGO as promoted in the 1950s was to help rectify this deficiency by permitting deep-draft vessels to access the Industrial Canal inner harbor. Authorization for the MRGO was formally provided by the United States Congress in the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1956. Construction was completed in 1968. Due to rapid erosion of the surrounding marsh, the canal was already as much as four times wider by 2005 than as originally constructed. When MRGO was built, the channel was wide at the surface. By 2005 the channel had opened to up to 3,000 feet in some locations and had been dredged annually. MRGO's operational performance With the completion of MRGO in 1965, the Port of New Orleans advanced a plan to largely abandon its wharfs along the Mississippi River and relocate its activities to the inner harbor created by the Industrial Canal, the Intracoastal Waterway, and the MRGO. This vast project, termed Centroport U.S.A., never secured sufficient funding and was quietly jettisoned by the port in the mid-1980s. The France Road Container Terminal and the Jourdan Road Wharf were the only two elements realized according to the Centroport plan. After the abandonment of the Centroport project, the Port of New Orleans refocused its efforts on improving its infrastructure along the Mississippi River, and what little maritime traffic the MRGO hosted progressively dwindled, opening it up to withering critiques. In 1997, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian organization dedicated to "the principles of free enterprise and limited government" attacked it on economic grounds: The promised economic development along the 76 mile channel in poverty-stricken St. Bernard Parish has yet to materialize. What the MRGO has delivered is an $8-plus million yearly maintenance plan for commercial and recreational waterborne traffic. The nearly $1 billion price tag for the less than two large container ships a day that use the channel is baffling, especially considering that the channel only shaved 37 miles off the original route. Prior to Hurricane Katrina, environmentalists and others, including voters in St. Bernard Parish whom the canal was intended to help, called for its closure. Criticism intensified following the hurricane, when engineers implicated the MRGO in the failure of levees and flood-walls protecting large parts of Greater New Orleans. MRGO was derisively termed a "Hurricane Highway" in Katrina's wake, due to its