Hurricane George, Four Years Later
By Greg Palast
There's another floater. Four years on, there's another victim face down in the waters of Hurricane Katrina, Dr. Ivor van Heerden.
I don't get to use the word "heroic" very often. Van Heerden is heroic. The Deputy Director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center, it was van Heerden who told me, on camera, something so horrible, so frightening, that, if it weren't for his international stature, it would have been hard to believe:
"By midnight on Monday the White House knew. Monday night I was at the state Emergency Operations Center and nobody was aware that the levees had breeched. Nobody."
On the night of August 29, 2005, van Heerden was shut in at the state emergency center in Baton Rouge, providing technical advice to the rescue effort. As Hurricane Katrina came ashore, van Heerden and the state police there were high-fiving it: Katrina missed the city of New Orleans, turning east.
What they did not know was that the levees had cracked. For crucial hours, the White House knew, but withheld the information that the levees of New Orleans had broken and that the city was about to drown. Bush's boys did not notify the State of the flood to come which would have allowed police to launch an emergency hunt for the thousands that remained stranded.
"Fifteen hundred people drowned. That's the bottom line," said von Heerden. He shouldn't have told me that. The professor was already in trouble for saying, publicly, that the levees around New Orleans were no good, too short, by 18″. They couldn't stand up to a storm like Katrina. He said it months before Katrina hit - in a call to the White House, and later in the press.
So, even before Katrina, even before our interview, the professor was in hot water. Van Heerden was told by University officials that his complaints jeopardized funding from the Bush Administration. They tried to gag him. He didn't care: he ripped off the gag and spoke out.
It didn't matter to Bush, to the State, to the University, that van Heerden was right- devastatingly right. Exactly as van Heerden predicted, the levees could not stand up to the storm surge.
In 2006, I met van Heerden in his office at the University's hurricane center; a cubby filled with charts of the city under water. He's a soft-spoken, even-tempered man, given to understatement and academic reserve. But his words were hand grenades: the Bush White House did nothing about the levees, despite warning after warning.
Why? A hurricane is an Act of God. But a levee failure is an Act of Bush -- of the federal government. Under the Flood Control Act of 1928, once the levees break, it's Washington's responsibility to save lives -- and to compensate the victims for lost homes and lost loved ones.
By telling me this, the professor had to know he was putting his job on the line. This week marks the fourth anniversary of the drowning of New Orleans.
Shakoor Aljuwani of the Rebuilding Lives Coalition reminds me it is also the fourth year of exile for more than half of the low-income Black residents who once lived in the Crescent City. In the Lower Ninth Ward, 81% have yet to return.
And it marks the end of Dr. van Heerden's career at LSU. They got him. Once the network cameras were turned away from New Orleans, as America and Anderson Cooper shifted attention to Brad and Angelina and other news, the University put an end to Dr. van Heerden. "In 2006 they started the nonsense -- they stopped me from teaching. They tried last year to get faculty to vote me out."
His contract was not renewed; he was forced out too, dumped along with the chief of the Hurricane Center who led the academics who supported van Heerden's research. The Man Who Was Right was fired.
Cronies and Contracts
I did not seek out professor van Heerden about Bush's deadly silence. Rather, I'd come to LSU to ask him about a strange little company, "Innovative Emergency Management," a politically well-connected firm that, a year before the hurricane, had finagled a contract to plan the evacuation of New Orleans.
Innovative Emergency Management knew a lot about political contributions, but seemed to have zero experience in hurricane response planning. In fact, their "plan" for New Orleans called for evacuating the city by automobile. When Katrina hit, 127,000 wheel-less New Orleans folk were left to float out.
And van Heerden knew all about it. Well before the hurricane, I discovered, he'd pointed out flaws in the "Innovative" plan -- and was threatened for the revelation by a state official. The same official later joined the payroll of Innovative Emergency Management.
When I asked the company, at their office, for a copy of the plan, they body-blocked our Democracy Now! camerawoman and called the cops.
Not everyone shared the harsh fate of van Heerden. Just this month, Innovative Emergency Management, the firm with the drive-for-your-life plan, was handed a fat contract by the State of Alabama to draft - you guessed it - a hurricane evacuation plan for Mobile.
The City That Care Forgot
After the flood, I filmed the uplifting story of Common Ground, the commune of Katrina survivors who, under the leadership of the community organizer Malik Rahim, rebuilt a shattered hulk of a building with their own sweat and donated materials. They housed 350 displaced families.
Since I broadcast that film in 2006, Rahim and the tenants were evicted by speculators who bought the building. Just before Christmas, elderly residents were carried out and dumped in the street, literally, by marshals. The speculators paid the families who build their new edifice not one dime.
We also filmed the story of Patricia Thomas, a woman fighting to return to her home in the beautiful Lafitte public housing project. Speculators have long lusted for this property on the edge of the French Quarter.
And now the speculators have it. Patricia's home, unscathed by Katrina, was nevertheless bulldozed. As Rahim puts it, "They wanted them poor niggers out of there and they ain't had no intention to allow it to be reopened to no poor niggers." Their plan succeeded. Patricia, homeless, died last year.
This Friday, take a moment to remember a courageous professor, an indefatigable activist and the refugee families who once lived in what was once called, "The City That Care Forgot."
Now, in 2009, you could call it the city that everyone forgot.
Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed Madhouse. For one week only, the International Humanities Center is offering, free of charge, a download of Greg Palast's investigative report for Democracy Now!, "Big Easy to Big Empty - the untold story of how the White House drowned New Orleans" at www.GregPalast.com. Download the film or make a donation to support these investigations and get a copy signed by Palast at www.gregpalast.com/bigeasy.
(Image: 1. New Orleans memorial to Katrina's dead featuring a quote from Ivor van Heerden -- "If we had the will and one month's money from Iraq, we could do all the levees and restore the coast."; 2. New Orleans residents protest LSU's decision to fire Dr. Ivor van Heerden.)
In third paragraph, you mean breached, not breeched.
Breech is a noun. Breach is a verb.
August 28, 2009 12:21 PM | Reply
When Hurricane Katrina blew in; it exposed that the empire had no clothes!
What happened in the Big Easy was foretold three years prior in a five-part series in the New Orleans Times-Picayune.
October 2004’s National Geographic fictional story became a fact, for it laid out the scene in incredible detail, which became reality on TV.
Local officials and FEMA knew about the probability that even a slow-moving category three hurricane would cause catastrophic loss and a lot of human misery.
Climatologists have predicted and warned us that powerful storms will occur more frequently in this century, because of the rising sea level from global warming.
The hardest-working marsh in America is the Louisiana bayou, and we have neglected its health.
For three hundred years, men have built walls and levees to control that mighty force of nature, and it has wrecked havoc on New Orleans’s natural defenses.
From the Mississippi border to the Texas state line, Louisiana is losing its protective fringe of marshes and barrier islands faster than any place in the U.S.
Excerpted from: "Back to the Big Easy by Way of Gaza"
http://www.wearewideawake.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1359&Itemid=223
August 28, 2009 6:13 PM | Reply
Is there no recourse for those who sounded the alarm that the sky would fall?
Is there anybody out there?
August 28, 2009 8:03 PM | Reply
This article is seriously biased near the end. There are some simple misrepresentations when quoting the woman who lived in the Lafitte housing project.
The Lafitte housing project was beautiful when built in the 1940's. It was originally meant for returning GI's from WWII. They would spend 3-6 months living in the barracks style public housing when returning home, so they could have time to get a job and return to civilian life after the war.
In 2005 when the storm hit, Lafitte was a mess. After years of neglect the housing projects of New Orleans were and still are a hotbed of constant murder and violent crime. The people living there were living off of the government, and had no ambition to move on a make something of themselves. For the sake of the French Quarter and the residential areas unaffected by Katrina, the city used it's best judgment in knocking down Lafitte and four other projects around the city. In their place they are building low to middle income rentals that the city will rent out and that will accept section 8. Who are these speculators lusting after the "poor Negroes" entitlement that you write about?
It's embarrassing to say, but remember when writing a provoking article try not to be persuaded by opinion, and do a little research and fact checking yourself.
August 28, 2009 9:47 PM | Reply
A tragic nightmare for America. Outside NO we watched as unprepared local and state officials tried to blame all their failures on the US Govt. This area knew the threat of flood. Individuals refused to take responsibility for their own safety. Today's question is why are people investing time and money in the same place that is likely to again flood? To the residents of NO I would say, "your suffering has been monumental, but supporting leaders who failed in the past will not improve your tomorrows. I hope tomorrow brings better times for NO."
September 4, 2009 12:49 PM | Reply
Loisiana is conservative controlled and I think they wanted to drive out the nonwhite population of New Orleans, and want to keep them out still. Obviously the state university is controlled by the state and that is Jindal. If This professor is not on board with flooding out minorities, then he should work for a liberal state. He really should have quit ahead of being fired, and participated in The Big Sort.
http://www.thebigsort.com/maps.php
September 5, 2009 11:52 AM | Reply