BATON ROUGE, LA—Celebrating the finished project with a ribbon-cutting ceremony, federal officials announced Monday that construction was finally complete on a canal connecting chemical runoff with the Mississippi River. “After 20 years in the making, the Phosphorous Canal will allow toxic waste chemicals to flow directly from nearby chemical facilities to the Mississippi River in half the time,” said U.S. Army Corps of Engineers chief engineer Lt. Gen. Scott A. Spellmon of the 35-mile-long canal, which is capable of transporting up to 15 millions gallons of chemical waste per day directly into the nation’s longest river, where it will flow into the Gulf of Mexico. “This is one of the nation’s biggest infrastructure achievements since the New Deal era. For too long, chemical runoff like phosphorus, nitrogen, and carbonyl sulfide has been forced to take the long way around through local soils before making it to the Mississippi. This project, first proposed decades ago, took hundreds of workers a couple decades to finally construct, but making chemicals from dozens of far-flung industrial sites flow straight into the Mississippi this efficiently is well worth the wait. Construction will now begin on several tributary canals that will enable the Phosphorus Canal Zone to transport hundreds of millions of gallons of industrial waste from miles around.” Federal officials also responded to concerns about the project’s potential impact on residents, promising that the Phosphorus Canal Zone could increase local cancer rates by as much as 250%.