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 ...
Jeez, that's not funny. Not as a joke. Not as sarcasm, or what ever you think you are doing!
Everyone knows it was Karl Rove who planted the bombs and Cheney who set them off. ;)
Hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, blizzards, wildfires...
And don’t forget all those who moved into the tornado areas.
People are just stupid who live in areas where all this is going on.
Do you know that Congressman Shays held hearings with regard to the failed levies and had a black engineer insist that he had other black engineers who could prove that the levies were intentionally blown up. I watched that hearing on CSPIN and couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
Best part of that obscene hearing is that Shays was defeated and is no longer in congress. What a disgrace.
It’s no wonder people began to hate the repubs as much as the dems.
Luckily for us, most of those morons in our party are gone. And the dems now have to deal with Specter and his ilk.
T]he university criticized him for speaking about levees without having engineering training.
A silly thing like that never stopped Algore from becoming a Nobel laureate.
Since he is an expert, maybe Algore will hire him.
He was more like the spokesman for the team that included engineers that was tasked to provide an independent investigation on what happened with the levees.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqGkWNw6zxI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzaU2fMgN3g
The Katrina Video Congress Didn’t Want You To See
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epwpnMztkM0
Maybe he misspoke and said the Army Corpse of Engineers?
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