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The Storm is the ultimate inside story of the Katrina tragedy. Van Heerden knows why the levees failed to protect New Orleans. He knows why the abused wetlands surrounding the city could not protect the levees.
- Ivor Ll Van Heerden, Mike Bryan
- 2006
Aug 24, 2015 · Four years later, LSU settled a lawsuit van Heerden filed over that firing, for an undisclosed sum. But by then he had found a new home in a cove on Chesapeake Bay. Now retired and a month from turning 65, he said the setting provides an ideal shelter for his sailboat and healing for a psyche shredded by his professional ordeal.
VAN HEERDEN: It showed that most of eastern New Orleans was going to be underwater, with 11 feet of standing water in many places. And it showed there also would be significant flooding...
For years, Ivor van Heerden, a hurricane expert at Louisiana State University, has seen it coming. Since 2001, he and colleagues have been generating computer models of how a major storm...
- An Ominous Scenario
- Preparing For Disaster
- The Storm Approaches
- Broken Promises
- Catastrophic Failure
- Aiding The Rescue and Preparing For The Future
- Disgust and Heartache
Walk me through the worst-case scenario—if a hurricane hits New Orleans.
If we look at the case of a slow-moving Category 3 passing west of the city, the floodwaters push into Lake Pontchartrain, and then they push through some highly industrialized areas. As they pass through these areas, they pick up a lot of chemicals. Remember, the flooding is occurring at the same time as a lot of wind damage, a lot of things breaking and coming apart. So these highly contaminated waters then flow into the city. Within the city you have about 300,000 people who haven't left....
Is this something that a state can handle? The State of Louisiana?
No, this is definitely something that requires the full resources of the U.S. government. We are fortunate that the federal government is starting to recognize that this is a serious problem. In July of this year [2004] we had an exercise called the Hurricane Pam exercise, where all the federal agencies got together with state agencies. We did a simulation of what would happen, and then these agencies got together and tried to decide how they would deal with a flooded New Orleans. So there is...
How great is the risk of this happening?
If we look in the last eight years, we have had two near misses of New Orleans [Hurricane Georges in 1998 and Hurricane Ivan in 2004]. And as the wetlands fall apart, the potential of these hurricanes to do major destruction through storm surges rises and rises and rises. So every year that goes by, the probability of this killer storm occurring increases. Statistics right now would suggest maybe once every seven to eight years we're going to have a near miss.
So if there's a chance of a big hurricane and this scenario playing out every seven or eight years, what's the solution? What could be done?
There are two very important mitigation activities that the federal government has to pursue today. Number one is our wetlands protect us from a surge. Our wetlands and barrier islands are our outer line of defense. We need to restore them. Now, that's in the longer term. In the shorter term, we can start thinking about how can we reduce the amount of water that flows into Lake Pontchartrain and then floods the city? We need to be really innovative, think outside the box, and in addition we'v...
Bring me back: Katrina comes through Florida and starts making its way across the Gulf. Here at the Hurricane Center at LSU [Louisiana State University], what do you do?
Early Saturday morning, we assembled at LSU and started doing the [storm surge] model runs. We did about three that day. And the last one we did we released in the evening, and that was the one that showed that New Orleans was actually going to flood. I then sent an e-mail to a lot of different federal agencies, state agencies, the media, letting them know what was happening. The Weather Channel and then The Times Picayune contacted us, and they wanted to use it for an article for Sunday morn...
What did your model tell you about Katrina?
It showed that most of eastern New Orleans was going to be underwater, with 11 feet of standing water in many places. And it showed there also would be significant flooding just west of the Industrial Canal.
Did you think the model would be accurate?
Yes. We have a lot of faith in our models; we've been working on these models since 2001. We've done a lot of ground-truthing, with storms such as Ivan and Dennis, comparing the actual surge to what we produce.
Do you think FEMA officials and others were reluctant to believe the science, believe the models?
I think that there is a real lack of appreciation for the science. I know from the exercises we've been involved in, certainly with FEMA officials, not all of them have been very responsive. You know, I think a lot of them are ex-military folk, and to them we may be geeks.
So at the Hurricane Pam exercise you did with FEMA in July of 2004, to play out a scenario of a major disaster, not all of the officials took what you had to say seriously?
At the Hurricane Pam exercise we had a number of officials who basically scoffed at us when we were talking about the potential of levees going and the very real threat to New Orleans of a major hurricane. I think they just believed it wouldn't happen. There were other officials who did. Certainly at Jefferson Parish, they really paid heed to what we had to say, and we did a lot of work with them in helping them to understand. The other important thing about the Pam exercise is that a lot of...
You've been warning about New Orleans' vulnerability to a big storm for years. If more government officials had heeded such warnings earlier on, could things have played out differently?
Yes. There were so many different areas where we could have seen a much better response from the government. Number one, we could have had the evacuation of the 57,000 families in New Orleans who don't own motor vehicles completed before the storm arrived. That's the first thing. The second thing is, we could have had military transport aircraft flying into the New Orleans Airport—it was serviceable early on Tuesday [August 30]—bringing food and water, the necessary amphibious vehicles if nee...
Did you expect the levee failures?
You know, I think all of us had been lulled into a sense of security by the continual assurance by the Corps of Engineers that the levees were never going to fail. Obviously, this was not the case. Before Katrina arrived I had looked at just about every single levee in the Greater New Orleans area, and I definitely had some concerns about some of the designs. The Louisiana soils, when they get waterlogged, get very, very soft, and I was worried that some of the earthen levees might not stand...
How many breaches were there in the various levees?
There were 28 different breaches.
Can you just describe the two main ones?
The 17th Street canal breach was over 600 feet long. The London Avenue canal had two breaches, both about 300-400 feet long. The field evidence shows that there was catastrophic structural failure of these levees. Basically, the whole levee system, including part of the dyke, slid sideways, in some cases almost 30 feet due to the pressure of the water.
As the city flooded, what were you and your team doing?
As soon as Katrina had passed through I contacted our funding agency and asked if I could divert our research funds to operational support. So we immediately got a mapping group organized at the Emergency Operations Center. They started producing maps for search and rescue, mapping the 911 emergency calls, producing other flood-related maps. We had other crews immediately going out to assess the level of damage so that rescuers could understand which areas they needed to concentrate on. And o...
And what now?
We're trying to characterize what happened in Katrina. What worked, what didn't work? How good were our models, and how can we modify our models for the future? We want to make all this available so that others will be able to use that information to better understand what the impacts could be if a major hurricane hit their area. This can help a lot of different governmental agencies both here and overseas in designing the structures and infrastructure for coastal cities, so that these govern...
How should New Orleans be rebuilt? And do you think that New Orleans will ever be the same again?
Hopefully the federal government gets one thing right, and that is to rebuild Louisiana the way it should be done. We need to come up with a very secure hurricane protection system. We need to rebuild those coastal wetlands so we can get the full benefits in terms of surge reduction. We need to run all of those activities through the city of New Orleans so we regenerate the New Orleans economy. And hopefully New Orleans will recover. It's never going to be the same again. One hundred thousand...
It's clear you are upset about how the federal government responded to Katrina.
The federal government's involvement in Katrina was disgustingly slow. It was unbelievable, especially because we'd done the Hurricane Pam exercise and I had even briefed White House officials. And, you know, for me, I grew up in apartheid South Africa, and what I saw in a lot of the images was mostly white policemen and military officials ordering mostly black Americans around. And I flashed back on the apartheid scenes that I saw back in the 1980s. It was totally disgusting, and the federal...
It's been five weeks since Katrina. How does it make you feel to see the city now—with vast amounts of it still unoccupied, and some areas looking like they won't ever be occupied again?
I was in New Orleans again yesterday all day, and I went into some areas I hadn't been before where the devastation was even worse than I had seen previously. You know, I'm really, really heartsore for those people. Every home has a story. Every home had a life. Every home had a family. And you walk past some of these homes—only half of them are standing, because they've been destroyed by the floods—and you see on the mantelpiece photographs, family photographs. You walk down the road and you...
Feb 1, 2006 · Professor Ivor Van Heerden of Louisiana State University's Hurricane Centre used computer modelling to simulate hurricane paths across New Orleans. He had been appointed by the state to...
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The Beauregard-Keyes House is a historic residence located at 1113 Chartres Street in the French Quarter, New Orleans, Louisiana. It is currently a museum, the BK Historic House and Gardens, that focuses on the past residents and associates of the house.
