Word: waterway
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...even Texas tall talk can exaggerate the waterway's real importance. Enormous industries today stand bound together by a water highway carrying 41 million tons of freight some 7 billion ton-miles annually-more tonnage over a greater distance than either the Kiel or the Panama Canal. Touching every major Gulf port, it has helped boost New Orleans into the nation's No. 2 seaport, transformed Houston from an inland city into one of the busiest U.S. ports, handling $500 million worth of waterway cargo alone last year, including everything from autos to seashells. The waterway has also...
...year Fight. The man who gets credit for pushing the waterway to completion was a pioneering Victoria, Texas banker named C. S. E. Holland, who spent most of his life fighting for a cheap way to carry the Gulf Coast's raw materials north in return for needed manufactured goods. Forming the Intracoastal Canal Association with the help of another hard-driving businessman named Roy Miller, he badgered a reluctant Congress into shelling out funds over a period of 40 years, first for a short, 53-mile strip in Louisiana barely 40 ft. wide, 5 ft. deep, later...
...ever regretted the expenditures. The Intracoastal Waterway more than paid its way during the bitter U-boat warfare of World War II, when the U.S. used it to transport 90 million tons of vital supplies, safe from preying U-boats in the Gulf. But the Waterway has really proved its value in peacetime. At least 500 companies (among them: Reynolds Metals, Alcoa, Monsanto, Dow Chemical) have built plants and warehouses along its banks, while thousands of others use it for cheap transportation. One enterprising Texan has built up a booming business carrying truck trailers up and down the canal...
...Marshes. The biggest waterway customer of all is the booming Gulf Coast oil industry, which last year shipped out some 25 million tons of petroleum products, more than half of all the waterway's traffic. From New Orleans' Harvey Lock southward, the water is lined solid with oil activity-war-weary landing craft being converted into tenders for offshore drilling rigs, big yards piled high with pipe, well-cementing companies, plants where the giant offshore rigs are fabricated. At intervals, veinlike side canals branch off into the marshes, where oilmen have dredged passageways to float equipment into their...
This year alone 22 companies will either build or expand plants along the waterway. Reynolds Metals is expanding; so is Alcoa, with a new $45 million aluminum plant at Point Comfort, Texas. Estimates are that the surging chemical and petrochemical industries will shoot up 70% by 1960, and the Gulf Coast will get much of the expansion. Texas alone will add $260 million worth of new plants in the next two years. Firestone Tire & Rubber is building a huge chemical plant at Orange, Texas; Dow Chemical is expanding its Freeport. Texas plant by $45 million, while Gulf Oil, Foster Wheeler...