The Storm: What Went Wrong and Why During Hurricane Katrina--The Inside Story from One Louisiana Scientist

It was a natural disaster — but magnified enormously by government's crushing incompetence in both preparation and response. The storm leveled the Mississippi Gulf Coast, but man-made problems destroyed New Orleans. The catastrophic flooding there should never have happened. Properly designed and constructed levees would have protected the city. Instead, they collapsed. Never in American history has a natural disaster been magnified so disastrously by the systemic failure of our government to protect and serve the people. The result is the national tragedy known forevermore as simply Katrina.

The question is, what do we do now?

The story begins innocently, with yet another little disturbance in the Caribbean, the next in a summer's growing storm count. But some scientists were already fearing the worst as tropical depression 12 strengthened into a hurricane, grew still more in the Gulf of Mexico, then took deadly aim at the most vulnerable coastal region in the United States: south Louisiana and the famed "city that care forgot," New Orleans.

Among those scientists was LSU disaster specialist and hurricane researcher Ivor van Heerden. For the last decade, he had used every available megaphone to warn of this catastrophe waiting to happen. On August 29, 2005, his worst fears became reality, and the natural disaster in Louisiana and Mississippi quickly evolved into national disgrace. Soon van Heerden became perhaps the most prominent independent voice in the national media pressing the administration, FEMA, the Corps of Engineers, everyone at all levels of government to act now.

The Storm is the ultimate inside story of the Katrina tragedy. In Louisiana, van Heerden is known as a scientist who tells it like it is. He knows why the levees failed to protect New Orleans. As a former coastal restoration chief for the state, he knows why the abused wetlands surrounding the city could not protect the levees. He knew how many people would be unwilling — or unable — to evacuate and how many homes were likely to be destroyed. And he has seen with his own eyes the politics responsible over the decades for the failure to plan for this completely predictable situation. He now unites this understanding with his firsthand, behind-the-scenes reporting, including the state's official investigation into the levee failures, which he led.

Van Heerden witnessed the desperation of first responders who were unable to talk with one another — and the heroism of those same responders, tirelessly working the waters of a flooded New Orleans to save thousands of lives. This is their story. It is the story of the families that escaped the flooding in Louisiana and the devastating storm surge on the Mississippi coastline — and it is told in memory of those 1,300 Americans who did not.

If the past is indeed prologue, "America's wetlands" is in terminal trouble, but they don't have to be. Van Heerden lays out the necessary course of action for building the levees and the protective wetlands that will guarantee "Cat 5" flood protection for New Orleans and the surrounding communities. Success depends only on civic will and political leadership. Van Heerden doesn't like to see science pushed to the sidelines, but that is what happened in Louisiana for decades. He is the only one to connect the dots between the bureaucrats, the politicians, the Corps of Engineers, and the tragic chain of events that culminated in the catastrophe that crippled, perhaps forever, a great American city.

"This serious, scientific explanation of what exactly happened in the hours-and years-leading up to Hurricane Katrina's devestation of New Orleans brings a fresh perspective to a tragedy that has generated remarkably similar news accounts over the past eight months. Van Heerden, Deputy Director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center, gives a passionate, rigorous account of what went wrong in New Orleans that, if admittedly non-objective, is a noble and credible call for truth and accountability Long recognized by FEMA as one of the three most likely and dangerous disasters threatening the country, the possibility of a hurricane like Katrina was ignored by corrupt politicians and discounted by residents tired of past evacuations (George, Floyd, Ivan, and Rita) that in hindsight seemed unnecessary. Technical details threaten at times to overwhelm readers interested in the human story of the storm, but van Heerden manages to navigate the narrow path that fuses scientific data with a gripping narrative worthy of a Tom Clancy thriller. Informative and emotional, Van Heerden's book sheds new light on one of the most destructive-and important-natural disasters to hit the U.S. in modern history, and is a must-read for anyone truly interested in the facts behind Hurricane Katrina." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"Hurricane Katrina has been widely described as the largest 'natural' disaster ever to strike this country. It was not, of course. However violent the storm's meteorology, the cataclysm it triggered in New Orleans was almost entirely man-made. If the dozens of government, academic and journalistic post-Katrina investigations haven't convinced you of that, these four books will. Hastily — often sloppily... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) — written and larded with cant and outrage, they nonetheless make an irrefutable case that one of America's most evocative and treasured cities was devastated by bureaucratic incompetence and turf-warring, political myopia and malfeasance, and individual and corporate greed.

Weightiest, in both pages and scope, is Douglas Brinkley's 'The Great Deluge,' a prodigious work of industry penned on the fly while the storm-displaced Tulane history professor flitted from one refuge to another for six months. It is also an infuriating hodgepodge that reads too often like a college sophomore's journalism thesis thrown together from video clips and Internet blogs, replete with pretentious dial-a-quote literary and pop-cultural references. Want to learn the recipe for a hurricane cocktail? Who owned a cat named 'Orange Kitty'? What Oprah Winfrey thought of FEMA's relief efforts? About looters defecating in a restaurant deep-fryer? It's all here somewhere. Hip-hop lyrics, National Public Radio transcripts and Larry King interviews vie with genuinely riveting survivor stories, National Guard diary entries, FEMA e-mails and the memories of NBC cameramen.

Like miles of hurricane wreckage on a storm-swept coast, much of it is fascinating and much just junk. For those willing to slog through its more than 700 pages, however, 'The Great Deluge' presents an exhaustive overview of Katrina and its apocalyptic aftermath. To his great credit, Brinkley does not slight the Mississippi Coast. Some of his most compelling narrative describes the war-zone surrealism of the 50 miles there where Katrina's 30-foot storm surge came ashore. In surge-flattened Waveland, 15 policemen clung for hours in the flood waters to a 'butt-ugly bush' they had planned to chop down as an eyesore only weeks before. At the stifling Hancock Medical Center on the highest ground in Bay St. Louis, sweating doctors and nurses stripped almost to their underwear to keep operating while snakes and crawfish invaded the corridors and a panicked armadillo raced from room to room looking for shelter.

Still, it beggars the imagination that the author and his publisher could have produced such a massive book without including a single map. How is the reader to make sense of the storm track or of key flood areas like the Lower Ninth Ward and the Industrial and 17th Street Canals without graphic help? Likewise, one wonders who, if anyone, was editing a text that spells flood 'dike' two different ways (mirroring the 'Dykes for New Orleans' bumper sticker proffered by the gay community?) and refers to ousted Senate majority leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) at one point as the 'former Louisiana Senator.'

Brinkley also wears his politics more than a bit on his sleeve. He cuts all sorts of slack for Louisiana Gov. Katherine Babineaux Blanco, a Democrat, despite her deer-in-the-headlights reaction to almost everything about Katrina and her bizarre reluctance to call out the National Guard. His contempt for New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and the Bush administration, on the other hand, would be excessive were their actions before and after the hurricane less criminally negligent. Nagin was so obsessed with his personal safety and cleanliness that he not only holed up on the 27th floor of the Hyatt Regency, ignoring staff urgings to lead his city, but at one point luxuriated in the shower aboard Air Force One, shaving his head, instead of lobbying the president for New Orleans' manifold post-Katrina needs. As for the Bush administration, we've all heard the FEMA stories, but how many can compare with FEMA Director Michael Brown's protest — while New Orleanians were dying — that he needed more than 20 minutes of phone-free dinner time because restaurant service was slow in Baton Rouge? Or with 100 critically needed rescue experts from all over the country being diverted en route to New Orleans for training on sexual harassment?

If such tales are the real meat of 'The Great Deluge,' in 'The Storm,' Ivor van Heerden, the deputy director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center, focuses on the science of Katrina — principally the elegant computer modeling that forecast the hurricane's path and probable strength nearly a week ahead of time (a forecast largely ignored) and the engineering analysis of why New Orleans' levees failed. He argues persuasively that the city's now-famous levee breaches should have been treated like crime scenes. For all the hurricane's fury, what flooded New Orleans was very definitely not 'The Big One' that Van Heerden and others have pictured for years in the city's doomsday scenario. New Orleans' levees failed not from a catastrophic storm surge on Lake Pontchartrain but from elementary design flaws visible for decades — flaws exposed by what amounted to little more than a minimal Category 1 hurricane inside the city's vital drainage canals.

Given the long-known history and geology of New Orleans' spongy soil, van Heerden writes, the federal government should be financially liable for the incompetence of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in underdesigning certain sections of the city's levee system. His book is rich with graphics that explain what went wrong and how to correct it. But he notes pessimistically that even after Katrina, state and federal lawmakers are still choosing corporate sugar plums over public safety when they write 'flood control' legislation.

The CNN anchorman Anderson Cooper's forthcoming 'Dispatches From the Edge,' as might be expected, tells us less about Katrina than it does about Anderson Cooper. But it's an intriguing window into the disaster-junkie mindset that lures media wannabes — and us — into Third World voyeurism.

Cooper — the son of blue-jean queen Gloria Vanderbilt and her fourth husband, actor-screenwriter Wyatt Cooper — was 10 when his father died of a heart attack. He has been haunted by an overwhelming sense of loss ever since, heightened by his brother's later suicide. He's dealt with these traumas by seeking out the world's more ghastly death zones — Bosnia, Somalia, tsunami-wrecked Sri Lanka, famine-wracked Niger. When CNN won't send him to places 'where the pain outside matched the pain I was feeling inside,' he heads there on vacation.

His vignettes from the world's horrorscapes rise above the swagger of many journalistic memoirs because Cooper — poor little rich boy though he may be — writes with competence as well as feeling. And it's difficult not to empathize when he recognizes that the tsunami-like devastation in Mississippi and New Orleans has brought him full circle to the streets of his father's birth and boyhood.

Chris Rose — who grew up here in Chevy Chase (Md.) — was an entertainment columnist at the New Orleans Times-Picayune until Katrina turned him into something approaching a war correspondent. '1 Dead in Attic' is his own 'Dispatches From the Edge' — a collection of columns written as he and his colleagues sought to retain sanity and keep working in the stinking, flooded wreckage of the once-beautiful city they love. These are impressionistic cries of pain and mordant humor, written as much for therapy as for witness, but they so aptly mirrored the sense of surreal dislocation experienced by New Orleanians that they turned Rose into a voice of the tortured city. Even before the Times-Picayune was awarded two richly deserved Pulitzer Prizes for its Katrina coverage, the paper's staffers were ricocheting around New Orleans in T-shirts saying 'We Publish Come Hell or High Water.' Rose's modest little paperback (available from www.chrisrosebooks.com) tells us what it took to keep doing that.

Ken Ringle, a retired Washington Post staff writer, has written extensively about his home state of Louisiana, its politics and its hurricanes.", Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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"This serious, scientific explanation of what exactly happened in the hours — and years — leading up to Hurricane Katrina's devestation of New Orleans brings a fresh perspective to a tragedy that has generated remarkably similar news accounts over the past eight months. Van Heerden, Deputy Director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center, gives a passionate, rigorous account of what went wrong in New Orleans that, if admittedly non-objective, is a noble and credible call for truth and accountability Long recognized by FEMA as one of the three most likely and dangerous disasters threatening the country, the possibility of a hurricane like Katrina was ignored by corrupt politicians and discounted by residents tired of past evacuations (George, Floyd, Ivan, and Rita) that in hindsight seemed unnecessary. Technical details threaten at times to overwhelm readers interested in the human story of the storm, but van Heerden manages to navigate the narrow path that fuses scientific data with a gripping narrative worthy of a Tom Clancy thriller. Informative and emotional, Van Heerden's book sheds new light on one of the most destructive — and important — natural disasters to hit the U.S. in modern history, and is a must-read for anyone truly interested in the facts behind Hurricane Katrina." Publishers Weekly Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The ultimate inside story: how bureaucracy, politics, and a disregard of science combined to cripple—perhaps forever—a great American city

As deputy director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center, Ivor van Heerden had for years been warning state and local officials about New Orlean‛s vulnerability to flooding. But like Cassandr‛s, his predictions were ignored—until Hurricane Katrina hit on August 29, 2005. Suddenly, van Heerden found himself at the center of a media maelstrom. Stepping forward to challenge the official version of events, he revealed the truth about the cit‛s shoddy levee construction.

Now, in The Storm, van Heerden shares up-to-the-minute reporting from his investigations and connects the dots among the Army Corps of Engineers, the bureaucrats, the politicians, and the chain of events—both natural and human—that culminated in catastrophe. An epic of cutting- edge science and systemic bureaucratic failure, The Storm is the first book from a major player in the Katrina disaster and a riveting narrative that brings expertise, passion, and a human viewpoint to Americ‛s greatest natural disaster.

Ivor van Heerden was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. He is cofounder and deputy director of the LSU Hurricane Center and director of the Center for the Study of Public Health Impacts of Hurricanes. He is also associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at LSU. He holds a Ph.D. in marine sciences from LSU, where his research focused on the Atchafalaya River Delta; his ongoing research areas include disaster preparation and response, coastal geomorphology, environmental management, and habitat restoration.

Mike Bryan has written or collaborated on many books, including Cal Ripken's bestselling autobiography The Only Way I Know, Uneasy Rider, and The Afterword, a novel.