Greg Palast has a good piece up about Dr. Ivor van Heerden, the Deputy Director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center, and his experiences with Hurricane Katrina. Dr. van Heerden’s computers predicted that the levees were built a foot and a half too low. After Katrina, their computers confirmed that those 18 inches were critical.
After Katrina, the Hurricane Center analyzed the flooding and found that, had the levees had just that extra 18 inches, they would have been “overtopped” for only an hour and a half, not four hours. In that case, the levees would have held, and the city would have been saved.
He had taken the warning about the levees all the way to George Bush’s doorstep. “I myself briefed senior officials including somebody from the White House.” The response: the university’s trustees threatened his job.
That wasn’t the only time his job was threatened.
The plan was that, when a hurricane hit, everyone in the Crescent City would simply get the hell out in their cars. Apparently, the IEM/FEMA crew didn’t know that 127,000 people in the city didn’t have cars. But Dr. van Heerden knew that. It was his calculation. LSU knew where these no-car people were — they mapped it — and how to get them out.
Dr. van Heerden offered this life-saving info to FEMA. They wouldn’t touch it. Then, a state official told him to shut up, back off or there would be consequences for van Heerden’s position.
This is how van Heerden puts it:
So I asked him what happened as a result of making no plans for those without wheels, a lot of them elderly and most of them poor.
“Fifteen-hundred of them drowned. That’s the bottom line.” The professor, who’d been talking to me in technicalities, changed to a somber tone. “They’re still finding corpses.”
Van Heerden is supposed to keep his mouth shut. He won’t. The deaths weigh on him. “I wasn’t going to listen to those sort of threats, to let them shut me down.”
Of course, the entire catastrophe probably could have been averted if the Bush administration doled out contracts based on merit rather than political donations.
A company named Innovative Emergency Management (IEM) was supposed to draft an evacuation plan, but no one can locate it. Their founder had no experience with evacuations. They dishonestly pitched their company by falsely claiming James Lee Witt was part of their team. And their punishment? They have the contract to create the new evacuation plan.
