London Avenue Canal Floodwall Breach

The canal behind this marker began as a small-boat waterway commissioned by Alexander Milne in the early 1800s and became one of the city's main drainage channels to Lake Pontchartrain. On August 29, 2005 its walls gave way on both sides, the east breach flooding Mirabeau and the west flooding Lake Vista, at surge levels more than four feet below design. Investigators later traced the failures to faulty design, including a misread sheet-pile load test. Today gates and large pump stations stand at the canal's mouth, with deeper steel piling and a lower safe water level.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Congo Square — 3.2 mi
  The 2.35-acre corner of Louis Armstrong Park where, from 1817, New Orleans confined Sunday dancing by enslaved people to one place, and where crowds of hundreds gathered to drum, dance and trade.
• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — 3.3 mi
  New Orleans' oldest surviving city of the dead, opened in 1789 after the fire of 1788 and the burial place of Homer Plessy, reachable only on a guided tour since March 2015.
• The Cabildo — 3.5 mi
  The Spanish town hall on Jackson Square, finished in 1799, where Louisiana changed flags in 1803 and where the state Supreme Court sat in the same room until 1910, Plessy v. Ferguson among its cases.
• The Historic New Orleans Collection — 3.5 mi
  A French Quarter museum and research center founded in 1966, whose 2015 Purchased Lives exhibition took on New Orleans' place as the largest slave market in antebellum America.

More markers nearby

• Fort St. John (Spanish Fort) — 1.4 mi
• Pontchartrain Park Historic District — 1.7 mi
• Fair Grounds Race Course — 1.7 mi
• Fannie C. Williams / Valena C. Jones Elementary School — 2.0 mi