A single scrap metal company was responsible for all of about 70 barges and ships that floated loose in a major city canal during Hurricane Gustav, threatening flood walls and a bridge, the U.S. Coast Guard said.

The Coast Guard said Monday it launched a formal investigation into whether New Orleans-based Southern Scrap followed a plan for securing ships and barges before a dangerous storm. It also barred the company from keeping any vessels in the canal during the rest of the 2008 hurricane season, which ends Nov. 30, and said it will review the order for future seasons.

The vessels — mostly barges but also two decommissioned Navy ships — got loose during Gustav last week in the Inner Harbor Navigational Canal, better known as the Industrial Canal, where a flood wall breach was responsible for much of the flooding that devastated the city in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina struck.

Some of the vessels crashed into an interior flood wall, a bridge and industrial warehouses.

Capt. Lincoln Stroh, the Coast Guard's New Orleans sector commander, wrote to Southern Scrap that the "company has not shown the ability to follow (its) Heavy Weather Protection Plan as hurricanes approach this Port."

Joel Dupre, president of Southern Scrap's parent company, Southern Recycling, has repeatedly said his company followed a federal mooring plan, but that Gustav's storm surge and high winds were too powerful, snapping anchor chains and causing other mooring failures the company had never experienced before, including during Hurricane Katrina.

The Coast Guard questioned whether the plan was truly followed.

There were fears that another big storm could unleash barges in an unprotected industrial area and sweep them toward a federal flood wall that protects the Upper 9th Ward.

That threat prompted the Coast Guard to issue an unprecedented order for all vessels to be removed from the Industrial Canal in advance of gale-force wind conditions.

Dupre said his company was now following Coast Guard orders to get all vessels out of the canal, or to sink them, by the time Hurricane Ike could threaten the area. Ike was on a projected path toward Texas on Tuesday but forecasters cautioned that the course could change.

Southern Scrap was in the process of either sinking in place or evacuating all of its vessels in the canal and poking holes in all grounded barges to make sure they won't float, Dupre said.