Ivor van Heerden

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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 the Hurricane Pam exercise in July 2004. He claims that his warnings during the Hurricane Pam exercise were ignored, which may have contributed to the Hurricane Katrina disaster. He has also taken the Army Corps of Engineers to task for their misdesigns which caused the Levee 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. [1]

In 2006 his book "The Storm" offered his analysis of Katrina and the levee disasters.

A quote from Van Heerden is on this neighborhood memorial to Katrina dead in the Bywater section of New Orleans

[edit] Quotes

"What bothers me the most is all the people who've died unnecessarily,"[2]

"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."[3]

When it was suggested that tents be prepared. "Their response to me was: 'Americans don't live in tents,' and that was about it."[4]

"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."