Posted on 02/11/2010 7:07:28 AM PST by La Lydia
Last April, Ivor van Heerden, an internationally known hurricane expert, was told he was losing his job at Louisiana State University. He and other experts said it was because of his outspoken criticism of the federal government’s flood protection of New Orleans; the university would not comment. Now van Heerden, the former deputy director of the L.S.U. Hurricane Center, is suing to get his job back...
...van Heerden, who was born in South Africa, joined L.S.U. in 1992 and rose to prominence as an expert on storms and the region, becoming a research professor and director of the Center for the Study of Public Health Impacts of Hurricanes. In the years before Hurricane Katrina he sounded alarms about the potentially devastating impact of a major storm on New Orleans despite 40 years of hurricane protection efforts.
After the storm, he vehemently criticized the Army Corps of Engineers...arguing that engineering mistakes had caused breaches in the hurricane protection system that led to most of the death and destruction in New Orleans.
State officials named him to lead Team Louisiana, an investigation into the causes of the damage from the storm. At the university, however, Dr. van Heerden’s growing profile as an antigovernment gadfly was seen as a problem. ...
He said he was told by administrators that his verbal barbs against the federal government would lead to cuts in aid for L.S.U., and the university criticized him for speaking about levees without having engineering training. Last April, he was told that his contract, ending in May 2010, would not be renewed.
In his court filing...he said L.S.U. had “placed the bureaucratic interests of university officials above the health and safety of the millions of people who live in the path of the hurricanes that threaten the Gulf Coast every year.”...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Everyone knows that Bush scuba dived alongside the levies and planted bombs.
Seriously tho, it seems to me anyone bashing the federal government for the levy failures would have been promoted.
Is he gonna play the "African-American" angle?
His picture makes it pretty clear he is a Boer. But yeah, he might throw that card out anyway.
That’s because you don’t understand how the money flows.
He’d have to be black to do that.
Follow the paper trail... as strong as my feelings are about Katrina, this is all kinds of wrong.
Don Corleone: I have a sentimental weakness for my children and I spoil them, as you can see. They talk when they should listen... Santino, come here. What's the matter with you? Never tell anyone outside the Family what you are thinking again. Go on.
It’s Bush’s fault! (FIRST! I Win!)
They’ll claim he’s a Global Warming Denier and get a pass.............
This is the main point I have been trying to get across because this is not just about New Orleans. Other cities are being “protected” by actively failing levees and the Corp isn’t doing much to fix things. There are a lot of people’s lives at risk.
This is an infrastructure issue that needs to be dealt with but instead of using tax dollars on upgrading our crumbling infrastructures the duds in office blow it on stupid crap like doorbells, golf courses, bridges to nowhere, etc.
In his court filing...he said L.S.U. had “placed the bureaucratic interests of university officials above the health and safety of the millions of people who live in the path of the hurricanes that threaten the Gulf Coast every year.”
How’s that again?
“Millions of people who live in the path of the hurricanes that threaten the Gulf Coast every year” ?
Millions? live in the path? every year?
Odd.
Wish Sam Kinison were here to explain it to these millions:
“You know, we’ve been coming here giving you food for about 35 years now and we were driving through the desert, and we realized there wouldn’t BE world hunger if you people would live where the FOOD IS! YOU LIVE IN A DESERT!! UNDERSTAND THAT? YOU LIVE IN A ... DESERT!! NOTHING GROWS HERE! NOTHING’S GONNA GROW HERE! Come here, you see this? This is sand. You know what it’s gonna be 100 years from now? IT’S GONNA BE SAND!! YOU LIVE IN A ... DESERT! We have deserts in America, we just don’t live in them!”
But we do have, according to van Heerden, fairly predictable hurricane trajectories, threatened annually, yet inhabited by millions. Odd.
Well. Hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, blizzards, wildfires... there's not room enough for all of us to live in Santa Fe. Which probably has problems of its own.
A silly thing like that never stopped Algore from becoming a Nobel laureate.
Hmmmm...my memory is playing tricks with me...
I don't seem to remember Sam pausing in the middle of a comment like that.
Pelicsn State ping
Okay, maybe I'm just dense this morning or there's something about contract law that I don't understand, but, if his contract was expiring in 2010, why would they be forced to renew his contract. He's not being fired .. at least, it doesn't appear so to me; his contract is not being renewed.
Is that a dismissal/firing?
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