- Ivor van Heerden
Ivor van Heerden is the deputy director of the
Louisiana State University Hurricane Center. He is also the director of the Center for the Study of Public Health Impacts of Hurricanes.Van Heerden was born in
South Africa . He created a hurricane modeling program at LSU. For the last decade he has been one of the most persistent voices warning of the inevitable effects of a major hurricane on the Louisiana coast. He was one of several hundred participants at theHurricane Pam exercise inJuly 2004 . He claims that his warnings during the Hurricane Pam exercise were ignored, which may have contributed to theHurricane Katrina disaster. He has also taken theArmy Corps of Engineers to task for their misdesigns which caused theLevee failures in Greater New Orleans, 2005 . For a time LSU told him not to talk to the media with concerns that book "The Storm" was endangering federal grant money flowing to the university. [http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/30/books/30stor.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5088&en=0e0db3ff031f3f7a&ex=1306641600&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss]In 2006 his book "The Storm" offered his analysis of Katrina and the levee disasters.
Quotes
*"What bothers me the most is all the people who've died unnecessarily," [http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9178501/]
*"Those FEMA officials wouldn't listen to me. Those Corps of Engineers people giggled in the back of the room when we tried to present information." [http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9178501/]
*When it was suggested that tents be prepared. "Their response to me was: 'Americans don't live in tents,' and that was about it." [http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9178501/]
*"As a nation, let's take up the 'Rebuild!' battle cry. Now is the time to put politics, egos, turf wars and profit agendas aside. We owe it to the thirteen hundred Americans who died in the Katrina tragedy. We owe it to their survivors and to all future generations. It's now or never."
References
* [http://hurricane.lsu.edu/ Louisiana State University Hurricane Center]
* [http://suspect-device.blogspot.com/2005/09/hurricane-pam-where-it-all-started-to.html Suspect-Device]
* [http://www.thestorm-katrina.com Ivor van Heerden's "The Storm" Site]
*the book "The Storm" by Ivor Van Heerden
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