The Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, completed in 1949, extends more than 1,300 miles along the Gulf of Mexico coast from Brownsville, Texas, to Apalachicola, Florida, providing a safer inland route primarily for commercial barge traffic while also serving commercial fishermen and recreational boaters. It is a vital part of a 12,000-mile inland and intracoastal waterway system maintained by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to directly serve 38 states and connect many of the nation’s busiest ports. Made up of both natural waterways and canals, the waterway includes sections that were once a borrow pit used to build the Atchafalaya Basin levee in the 1930s. Through the Basin it crosses or meets the Atchafalaya River, Bayou Lafourche, and the Vermilion River, and, like other human interventions in the Atchafalaya, it alters water flow through tributaries and distributaries by equalizing flows between some rivers and bayous that would otherwise be separated by natural levees and distance. About 10 percent of the Atchafalaya River’s flow turns east and west at the waterway and then continues to the Gulf. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers maintains the channel at a depth of 12 feet so barges and other shallow-draft vessels can pass without running aground. A connecting channel from Morgan City to the Port Allen Lock and the Port of Greater Baton Rouge created an essential link for domestic and foreign trade and helped encourage development of businesses such as the Verret Shipyard, which has built towboats since the mid-1900s.