Ivor van Heerden: The Storm

Ivor van Heerden describes himself as a disaster scientist. He was born in South Africa, but was drawn to Louisiana, first to LSU, then to the wetlands. He holds a Ph.D. in marine sciences, teaches civil and environmental engineering, is deputy director of the LSU Hurricane Center, and director of the Center for the Study of Public Health Impacts of Hurricanes. His background and strategic position offers a unique perspective on the Katrina disaster, as least in terms of New Orleans.

I've also read Michael Eric Dyson's Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster, which provides a good chronology of the hurricane and what happened after, as well as a longer meditation on how race factors in, especially on the response end. I don't want to go down that rathole, but my own view is that race didn't factor much into the post-disaster fiasco. On the other hand, there's no doubt that the poor were hit hardest and had the least recourse, and the deep history there has much to do with race. Indeed, the race politics of the Jim Crow south laid the foundation for government that recognizes no responsibility to its poor, while serving itself and its wealthy patrons with cronyism. FEMA's response to Katrina is just one example of the application of such Jim Crow politics -- minus the race baiting, mostly, but with the same contempt for anyone not hooked into the ruling class.

But van Heerden is invaluable for understaning just what happened, why it happened, what we knew about it and when, and how Katrina fits into the general pattern of hurricane threats. In addition to his scientific and engineering expertise, he was well connected, both to the media and to various political bodies -- even though he wasn't always welcome, as when the Army Corps of Engineers tried to obstruct his investigation of their levee failures.

The following are some long quotes from van Heerden's book, The Storm: What Went Wrong and Why During Hurricane Katrina -- The Inside Story From One Louisiana Scientist (2006, Viking). Mike Bryan is listed as second author, probably deserving much credit for the easy flow of the prose, but the story is told as a first-person memoir. The first quote sums up [pp. 10]:

Over thirteen hundred citizens in Louisiana and Mississippi died due to Hurricane Katrina -- the number as of February 2006, and certain to go up, perhaps dramatically, as the missing are reclassified. Six months after the storm, one hundred thousand families were still homeless. Some of those deaths and some of those dislocations were inevitable, because Katrina was a natural disaster. Others -- the majority -- were man-made. I don't see how we can avoid that conclusion. The levee systems failed inexcusably. We now thoroughly understand the need for coastal restoration as a buffer against the big storms, but land loss continues at an alarming rate. So what next? Should we clean up and rebuild New Orleans -- to the extent even possible -- if we then repeat the mistakes of the past? No, because the point overlooked in much of the Katrina media coverage is the fact that this hurricane was not the big one. I've learned that people don't want to hear this, because it makes them angry. But there it is.As Katrina should have affected New Orleans proper, she was decidedly a medium hurricane. Sometime in the foreseeable future a bigger storm will not take that last-minute jog to the east and every square foot of New Orleans -- all of it, not just 80 percent -- will be underwater, and deeper underwater than this time. Unless, that is, the right measures are authorized and funded immediately, then executed promptly and properly.

I don't like to see good science pushed to the sidelines just because it conflicts with narrow inteests pushing their self-serving agendas. Such politics as usual helped to inundate New Orleans in 2005. If science and engineering had been allowed to play their proper role in the development of policies for the wetlands and the levees, we wouldn't be in this situation today. If nothing changes in the future, one fifth of the state of Louisiana -- everything south of Interstate 10, including the city of New Orleans in its entirety -- will disappear beneath the waves, gone for good, and we will have no one to blame but ourselves. Future historians will be writing books about the "Cajun Atlantis."

Hard as it is to believe, nature has actually given us a bit of a second chance. There's something left to work with in New Orleans. We must put aside the politics, egos, turf wars, and profit agendas if we're going to reconstruct this city effectively, engineer proper levees, and restore the buffering coastline.

Van Heerden surveys the various scientists working with him at LSU's Hurricane Center, including a group he calls the "surge warriors" -- the people who gather the raw data for the Center's surge flow models, which predicted the extent of flooding due to overtopping levees [p. 40]:

Notice that about half of the surge warriors are not American-born, and no surprise. This is where we're at in this country today. More and more of the faculty and the majority of graduate students in engineering and physical scences are from foreign soil, and not just at LSU, everywhere in the United States. American kids are not that interested in long, demanding graduate programs that don't guarantee riches in the end. I think MBA programs may be sucking more than their fair share of the best students away from the sciences and engineering.

There are various stories about FEMA's arrogance and incompetence. At one point, van Heerden suggests the use of tent cities for evacuees: they are cheap, easy to assemble, can be provisioned for, and keep folks safe but close by so they can return quickly and maintain a labor pool for clean-up. They're actually common practice in many parts of the world, but FEMA rejected the idea out of hand, explaining that Americans don't live in tents. Instead, they shipped folks everywhere, to places with no provisions, while leasing cruise ships and buying up mobile homes. On the other hand, the Center for Disease Control appears to be just about the last bastion of science and sanity in the federal government [p. 59]:

The CDC's two-page list of health impacts included West Nile virus, rabies, waterborne gastrointestinal diseases, burns, pulmonary irritations -- the usual suspects, and more -- and it was the job of both our center at LSU and the CDC to be prepared to provide relief officials and policymakers with the best information regarding all of them. The CDC provides medical support teams to any state requesting their help, and it also has rapid-assessment teams, a critical part of any response to a major disaster. They can assure that the correct medical supplies, health resources, and manpower are available as soon as possible. Because of our research we could give them a good heads-up on what to expect after Katrina.

I was not surprised by the CDC's prompt and efficient response to the telltale surge model. They're on teh ball. Compared to some of the FEMA officials with whom we had dealt in the past few years, they are disciplined, scientific, fact-based, and results oriented.

A major part of the book concerns the levee failures and the Army Corps of Engineers' responsibility and cover-up [pp. 94-95]:

It must be repeated: If the only sources of water in New Orleans had been the rainfall from Katrina (seven to ten inches), the predicted overtopping of the levees of the Intracoastal Waterway and the Industrial Canals, the overtopping of the Lakefront Airport levee, and the breach at the CSX railroad junction, the flooding in the Orleans East and St. Bernard bowls on the eastern side of Greater New Orleans would have been much less damaging, and the flooding in the Orleans Metro Bowl, the heart of the city to the west, would have been relatively insignificant. According to our latest calculations, 88 percent of the flooding in the Orleans Metro Bowl, by volume, was due to the breaches on the London Avenue and 17th Street canals. In Orleans East, 69 percent of the flood was due to breaches. In the St. Bernard Bowl, 92 percent. Thus, on average, 87 percent of all the water that ended up flooding the greater New Orleans metro area was the result of levee failures that totaled less than 400 yards on the drainage canals and 650 yards on the Industrial Canal.

Van Heerden's other major interest is in wetlands restoration [p. 161-162]:

So the first point to know regarding the relationship of the disappearing wetlands and the peril in this part of the state is the irony that the flood-control measures necessary to create and then protect the infrastructure in this entire part of the state are contributing to the loss of land on which this infrastructure sits. The second point is the impact of the oil and gas industry, without which the state of Louisiana would practically collapse, economically. Our wetlands are the nation's number-one source of crude oil (pumping more than the Alaska pipeline) and the second-leading source of natural gas, and in order to support and transport this production the companies have carved, by one calculation, eight thousand miles of cuts and canals throughout the wetlands. Since this entire network ties into the Gulf of Mexico, it provides opportunity for salt-water encroachment. It is subject to erosion and disrupts the natural flow of waters in the marshes. The whole artificial system works to the detriment of the wetlands. No one claims otherwise. The third undisputed factor is shoreline erosion, inevitable at all times but especially relevant when the natural sedimentation processes offer no compensation.

More on wetlands [p. 167]:

Thanks to subsiding land and rising oceans, the southern part of Louisiana is three feet lower than it was one hundred years ago, relative to mean sea level. The state loses twenty-five square miles of wetlands every year, over twenty times the rate recorded in the early part of the last century, when wetlands gain for the most part equaled wetlands loss. Since the 1930s, this has come to more than a million acres of lost land. In another one hundred years, if we don't get serious about rebuilding these wetlands, the land will be another three feet lower and, for all practical (and aesthetic) purposes, no longer land at all.

And more [p. 169]:

Real estate developers hungry for terra firma are running out of acreage, so they dig canals to drain marshes and build ad hoc levees to protect the new sod from storm surge -- until it doesn't. What companies would ever insure such homes? Louisiana and Texas traditionally rank one and two in flood insurance claims. Increasingly, insurers are not writing homeowner policies in the wetlands, or they attach an explicit rider excluding hurricane damage. I hate to vote witht he insurance companies, but on this issue, who could blame them?

Van Heerden takes apart what he calls the Army Corps of Engineers' party line: "The levees were sound, but the event exceeded the design. Congress told us to design to a Cat 3, and that's what we did. Our hands were tied. Katrina was a Cat 4 storm." [p. 200]:

Simply not so, and at the LSU hurricane centers we were immediately suspicious of this whole scenario. The lowest of the levees in question were supposed to be fourteen feet above mean sea level, and the ADCIRC surge models had predicted a surge in the lake topping out at ten feet, maybe eleven, because the lake was on the western, or weaker, side of Katrina, where sustained winds were 75 mph. That's a Cat 1 storm, folks. The catastrophic storm surge had been to the east of New Orleans and, especially, on the Mississippi coast. For New Orleans and Lake Pontchartrain and the levees, Katrina was not a major hurricane. It's that simple, but as I mentioned in the introduction,I know from experience that people don't want to hear this. They want to have lived through this monster, and they want the catastrophe to have been caused by this monster. In the city itself, this just wasn't the case.

In October, we got word from NOAA that, indeed, Katrina might have been just a Cat 3 at landfall, and then the National Hurricane Center confirmed the number in late December. Additionally, the forward speed was fast, 14 mph to 17 mph, so over the lake and the city was a fast-moving Cat 1 hurricane -- nothing approaching the storm the Corps claimed the levees were designed to withstand.

Finally, this is his summary [pp. 289-290]:

I'm on record defending the radical idea that the same federal government that drowned New Orleans with the failure of its levees should compensate all of those who lost lives and homes. Instead, the best we have come up with so far is the plan devised by Congressman Richard Baker from suburban Baton Rouge to allot homeowners and lenders 60 percent of the pre-Katrina value of their demolished property. Sine the federal government is responsible for 100 percent of the losses, why not compensate for 100 percent of them? Still, coming from a conservative Republican, this was a pretty radical, progressive idea, and is appreciated as such. Of course, the Bush administration has declared the plan dead, but in February 2006, Governor Blanco announced a state initiative that adds $4.2 billion authorized by Congress for community development block grant funding to the $6.2 billion already guaranteed. Blanco proposed a cap of $150,000 on the money available to each homeowner to repair, rebuild, relocate, or accept as a buyout. A program to register potential homeowners is currently under way.

Let's face it. A just outcome for the homeowners is highly unlikely. Lord knows there are plenty of civil cases shaping up against various defendants, including the Corps, contractors, and insurance companies, but this litigation is guaranteed to last forever, and it is unlikely to deliver full justice to those who have lost everything. The state of Louisiana cannot possibly afford to pay for the program.

There are various drawings of levee cross-sections, details on the underlying geology -- weak soils, sands, peat, all of which are bad news, requiring steel piling to be driven much deeper than had been done. (The post-flood repairs often go 50 feet deeper.) Also details on the effect of canals, levees, destruction of barrier islands, and so forth on wetlands. Also various political tidbits, like the story of what he calls the "Pelican Brief" -- the short-lived post-flood economic recovery bill that Louisiana's senators proposed, stuffed to the gills with irrelevant pork projects. My favorite was a little item where, just before the flood, Senator Vitter filed a bill to promote mining the cypress trees that hold together the remaining wetlands.

A big part of van Heerden's message is that it is technically possible to build levees and flood control systems that, combined with a major program of wetlands recovery, could keep New Orleans and its key economic infrastructure secure from even a Category 5 hurricane. Of course, that doesn't factor in the likelihood of sea level rise due to global warming. But more immediate problems are still obvious: our system of profit-driven politics, real confusion over risk management and the role of government, and the increasing tide of contempt for science and reason. A good deal more than the future of New Orleans rides on how we face up to those problems, but it's hard to imagine a more graphic or immediate example.

posted 2006-09-23