Ivor van Heerden, a former deputy director of Louisiana State University’s Hurricane Center, today filed a lawsuit accusing LSU officials of wrongfully terminating his position as part of a campaign of retaliation for his criticism of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, a major source of the university’s federal grant money. Mr. van Heerden, who led a state team that investigated the damage done by Hurricane Katrina, has argued that much of the flooding of New Orleans following that storm can be blamed on the Corps of Engineers because, he says, it poorly designed and built the levees around the city.
RSS
Follow The Ticker through your favorite RSS reader.
4 Responses to Hurricane Expert Files Whistle-Blower Lawsuit Against Louisiana State U.
snwiedmann - February 11, 2010 at 7:05 am
Can anybody remember the US Army Corps of Engineers ever getting it right? Look at the devastation and havoc their projects have caused in Florida!
cwinton - February 11, 2010 at 10:22 am
And as usual, the truth of the matter is somewhere in between. Putting the blame on the Corps of Engineers ignores the culpability of those who lobbied for the federal government to build levees, the local pols who insisted on local control allowing levee maintenance money to be used as pork, local building codes allowing dwellings to be constructed with no regard to sea level, not to mention all of those who chose the ostrich approach (head in the sand) in the face of years of warnings regarding the state of the New Orleans levees. We see similar risks in California with an even more extensive system of levees and where the state is asking for help from, you guessed it, the Corps of Engineers.
sdunlap - February 11, 2010 at 3:31 pm
“Can anybody remember the US Army Corps of Engineers ever getting it right? Look at the devastation and havoc their projects have caused in Florida!”Yes, in 1957 it created something called “The Bay Model” (it still exists and is open to the public in Sausalito, CA) which showed that a planned dam in San Francisco Bay would result in a huge swamp. It saved us from an ecological and economic disaster. Too bad they did not model other projects first.
marchman - February 12, 2010 at 11:03 am
Blasting the Army Corps of Engineers is unfair in this case. After moving from the Midwest to do doctoral work at LSU in 1978, and I well remember being concerned with what might happen if a hurricane hit since it would be a new experience. In the Spring of 1979 when hurricane season began, local news stations discussed what would happen if a hurricane hit New Orleans, most of those interviewed were members of the Corps of Engineers who described what happened when Katrina hit 25 years later. The Corps of Engineers knew what issues needed to be addressed well in advance of Katrina, but needed funding to do anything about it, and neither the city of New Orleans, state of Louisiana, nor the federal government did anything to fund the problem. When Katrina hit the mayor of New Orleans proved totally inept, the governor and the state did not authorize the federal government’s prompt intervention, and most everyone has blamed the Bush Administration and the Corps of Engineers for not moving quickly enough despite Louisiana’s mishandling one thing after another. Given the fact that what was destined to happen was known at least 25 years earlier, maybe more, numerous city, state, and federal administrations bare the blame for failing to address the situation well in advance of Katrina. Significant aspects of the problems Katrina could have been avoided if politicians had addressed a disaster waiting to happen. In our point the finger and blame someone else culture the Corps of Engineers received significant amounts of criticism, but they were small factors in the problem given how long the problems had existed. They did receive the vast majority of the blame, but there is abundant blame to go around.