Fanning Up a Shitstorm


From the "no good deed goes unpunished" department, it seems as if Ivor van Heerden's getting flak from LSU, for, well, doing his job:

After Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, Ivor van Heerden and his colleagues searched through homes in the city he calls the Cajun Atlantis, looking for battery-powered clocks.

In the face of horrifying destruction, Dr. van Heerden, the deputy director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center, knew that small things helped tell the big story. The moment that the clocks' time stopped could show when the homes filled with water, data "vitally important to any good forensic study," as he puts it in his new book, "The Storm: What Went Wrong During Hurricane Katrina — The Inside Story From One Louisiana Scientist," published last week by Viking...

As a former chief of the state's office of coastal restoration efforts and a leader of the hurricane center, he had long been one of the state's best-known Cassandras on the coming crisis for New Orleans. In the months since the storm, as leader of the state's team of investigators of the disaster, he has helped reveal the flaws in design, construction and maintenance of the city's hurricane protection system that contributed to the destruction. Seeing the storm-ravaged homes and smelling the stench of death in them, he writes, "convinced me to try to get the federal government to own up to the fact that this city was flooded by the failure of its levees."

To many in Louisiana this outspokenness has made Dr. van Heerden a hero. But at his university it has gotten him called on the carpet for threatening the institution's relationship with the federal government and the research money that comes with that. Last November two vice chancellors at Lousiana State — Michael Ruffner, in charge of communications for the university, and Harold Silverman, who leads the office of research — brought him in for a meeting. As Dr. van Heerden recalled in an interview in Baton Rouge, La., the two administrators — one of whom controlled his position, which is nontenured — said that "they would prefer that I not talk to the press because it could hurt L.S.U.'s chances of getting federal funding in the future."

The administrators told him to work through the university's media relations department instead.

Dr. van Heerden regarded the meeting as a threat to his career. "I actually spoke to my wife about it that night," he remembered, "and said: 'Look, we need to recognize that I could lose my job. Are we prepared for that? Because I'm not going to stop.' "

The vice chancellors' directive lasted less than a week: after Dr. van Heerden channeled dozens of interview requests through the media office, the administrators dropped the new requirement.

E-mail messages about the incident obtained through a formal request to Louisana State University include an angry note to administrators from one of Dr. van Heerden's colleagues, Roy Dokka. Dr. Dokka, a geologist who is an expert on subsidence, the lowering of the ground's surface because of changes below, like the pumping of water or oil from underground reservoirs, is executive director of the Louisiana State University Center for Geoinformatics. His message said that during visits to Washington "I am asked how so-and-so's irresponsible behavior is tolerated."

His message concluded: "Academic freedom can be a shield to be stupid, but it is not a license to be irresponsible on public policy issues that involve lives and public safety. The university will remain in third-rate category unless the 'cowboys' are reighned in." (The word is misspelled, possibly a result of angry haste or carelessness.)

A message from Mr. Ruffner, the vice chancellor for communications, to Dr. van Heerden after their meeting stated that the university wanted to be in on helping with the recovery of Louisiana, "not in pointing blame."

In an interview Mr. Ruffner said Dr. van Heerden's training in environmental management did not qualify him to comment on engineering matters. "We don't see him as a viable source to be discussing the engineering aspect of the levees," he said. "I have an advanced degree in communications, but that doesn't qualify me to comment on the New York Philharmonic."

But, he added, as long as Dr. van Heerden does not claim to represent the views of the university, "he can say anything he wants."

Dr. Dokka said in an interview that he had written his heated warning to the university about "cowboys" after a visit to the Army Corps of Engineers headquarters in Washington not long after the storm. An official noticed Dr. Dokka's Louisiana State lapel pin. "He looks at it and says, 'What the hell is wrong with L.S.U.?' " Dr. Dokka recalled.

Dr. van Heerden pointed out that he had never claimed to be an engineer but said that he had worked closely with those with greater expertise in that discipline. He noted that the broad conclusion his team had come to — that the levees failed largely because of human error — were shared by every other major investigation of the issues, including the corps' own. "There's nothing we have put out there that hasn't been proved true by other teams," he said. And, he added, he suspects that his critics may not be as upset about what he might have gotten wrong as about what he has gotten right.

Dr. van Heerden, 55, came from the Natal province of South Africa to Louisiana in 1977 to do coastal research. He began banging the drum about the hurricane threat in 1994. In 2000 he helped found the hurricane center, which the university says is the largest resource of hurricane experts in the world and which has become a respected multidisciplinary institution that studies storms, defenses against them and their effects on society.

After Katrina hit, Dr. van Heerden said, he and his colleagues at the hurricane center realized that "those people sitting on the roofs and standing in the water don't have a voice."

But, he said, the issue is far from over. "Nature's given us a second chance," he observed. "Katrina was the warning. Katrina showed us a lot of our weaknesses." Now is the time, he added, for dirt, concrete and steel. "We've got to hope and pray that before we get anything like another Katrina, that we've raised the levees, armored them and built the necessary floodgates," he said.

If the system is not just patched but thoroughly improved, he said, "A lot of people will be a lot more willing to come back."

"But right now," he concluded, "there's nothing for them to come back to."

A couple of things here: first, calling van Heerden a "Cassandra" is hugely insulting: the term implies a degree of panic that most decidely turned out NOT to be the case. Instead, his warnings were literally dead-on accurate.

Second, this isn't the first time van Heerden's dealt with flak. I recall a couple of years ago when Waste Management gave him the swiftboat treatment--and evidently others were a bit more sinister--because he opposed a planned expansion of the Woodside landfill in Livingston Parish.

Now, I'm not a scientist. But my money's on HIS views, as opposed to those trying to silence or otherwise stifle him. As far as I can tell, van Heerden's track record is solid and proven. I don't know much of anything about his employers at LSU, but I DO know enough not to trust Waste Management as far as I can throw a balled up piece of paper into a headwind. And, as deputy director of the LSU Hurricane Center, I'd say he's doing EXACTLY what needs to be done: using language a non-scientist can understand, he's laying out the steps this country needs to take in order to protect a vital region--the UNITED STATES Gulf Coast. Is that too much to ask of the country?