Le Show; 2006-06-25

from deep inside your radio. This is Lesho and every couple months this year we've been having discussions about New Orleans Louisiana because this program is originating there from. Today it's my extreme pleasure and honor to have as my only guest, a man who has the uncomfortable distinction of having said it all before it happened, having told us so. And being very, you know, reminding us of that in a graceful but blunt way and is the author of a new book about Katrina it's Causes and It's Aftermath called The Storm. He's the deputy director of the LSU Hurricane Center, Dr. Ivo Ren here and welcome. Thank you very much. Thanks for the invite. It's my pleasure. Let's start with with the big question that's probably too vague to even get your arms around but what's the one thing or the couple of things that in your travels around the country you

find most people don't understand about what's happened here. Most people don't understand the scale of the damage, the scale of the problem and what I try and tell them is imagine if they went late one evening and drove for 45 minutes through suburbs of their hometown in a straight line then they would have an idea of the scale of the area of the number of homes and businesses destroyed. 45 minutes sounds light to me because one afternoon I started in the upper ninth and just decided to drive straight through the disaster without ever getting out of the zone and to drive over to Lakeview and I found I was driving but I was I was not doing a straight line I was zigzagging and after two and a half hours I got numb and gave up. Well you know 45 miles by 45 minutes by 45 minutes you know gives you a fairly large chunk of property and you know

it's just to try and get them to understand that this is not just one subdivision and this is not just a small part of the town next to you know some lake or something. This is a very very significant part of greater New Ones that got destroyed and I think the most depressing thing now is as you drive through the areas some of the plants have come back some of them had still dead from the saltwater it looks basically the same except now a lot of the motor cars the wheels are missing still in the same place still the same mud and the cars and you know the buildings look a little better because the rains washed the mud off but it's still extremely depressing because you realize every one of those homes had a life it had a history you know had a family and and so where are they? Where are all these people? I mean you go

from mile off to mile off to mile of empty homes and to me that's the most depressing thing that here we are nine months later and we still haven't resolved the issue of getting these people back on life giving them the compensation they deserve and so that they can start living. Anything else that you think people don't understand about this that that stands out? I think the other thing that really stands out and and this is a result of I think some right-wing press articles is the idea that everybody who got into trouble in New Orleans was their fault because they stayed and they lived in the city and what they don't recognize is that 85% of the people actually evacuated they did what they were supposed to do they got out it's not their fault that the levees failed that their homes got flooded that did what they were supposed to do the majority of the people who didn't leave were those who didn't have

motor vehicles or were too poor to leave or were the invalid and disabled who couldn't leave so there's this perception that it you know it serves them right they should have got out which is so so wrong now I I seem to have read in the welter of stuff about this that the vast majority of fatalities were among the aged is that correct? Yes about 75% of those who died were elderly so it's their fault that they're old it's their fault that it's their fault that they're in wheelchairs and it's their fault that they don't own a vehicle and can't drive out yeah personally for me as I go around the country and as I read the media even I know you're you're on friendly terms with them so I won't get you roped into this but people like Anderson Cooper who come down here a lot and congratulate themselves for coming down here a lot you you go to cnn.com and search for the words core of engineers and levees and there's so little said going back a year about it as if

what happened to New Orleans is what happened to Mississippi do you find that that's a distinction that people still can't make? Yes I think there hasn't been a full recognition in the public's eyes to the true nature of what happened the failure of the federal levees that were built by design constructed by the core of engineers perhaps you know that aspect of the Katrina story wasn't as newsworthy as the original first 14 days to to a month we have seen that some of the media outlets we thought would be more interested in the levees studies and the outcomes so not really paying much attention to it which is a pity because I think we in Louisiana have to get the rest of the country to understand

in order for us to get the funding we need to get our state back on its feet that the failure of the levees the whole New Orleans Katrina catastrophe was a consequence of the federal security system failing and if that hadn't happened we wouldn't be talking about Katrina right now there would have been a little flooding that's it you were the leader or one of the leaders of one of the three investigations that happened in the wake of Katrina one of the phrases the doctor B of the UC Berkeley team used our proposal you're just saying has planted itself in my mind he said without the levees failing we would have had wet angles exactly 15% of the water that got into New Orleans came from over topping the levees that's all the water they would have been in the city if the levees hadn't afield and it would have been pumped out fairly rapidly because the pumps

would have still worked right yeah would have been very easy to get them out you know we didn't have that much wind damage so there wasn't that much debris which could have clogged the pumps and it would have been a relatively easy job to to get New Orleans back on its feet your involvement in this has been long standing you've studied the risk you made predictions and made them public in ways that even got you in trouble with your superiors at the university to say this is this is a danger that's facing us which is why I said at the beginning that you have you have told us so and I'd like to go into what you say about FEMA and its level of preparedness but FEMA got a pretty good public spanking by the media and the core of engineers seems to have walked away relatively unscathed tell me a little bit about you refer to these the the smoking gun of the Vicksburg documents can you in in in brief kind of outline what that tells us what that document tells us and and others we now have is that the core of engineers never put a

great focus on getting the levees done it was more sure that they had to do and in fact they were cost-cutting measures all the way through the process some of them some of them because of for the cause own problems with the money whether it went to too much went to administration or whatever some of it because local politicians and levy boards were saying we don't have enough money the bottom line was we built these things on the cheap the core of engineers is very very good at running their own propaganda machine and you know and they've stayed on their story from from day one you know when this first started they were saying this was an act of God it exceeded the design of the levees and so on and therefore we're not at fault and and we knew from basically Tuesday

evening that there wasn't true you know from from our own initial research what do you think about the report that the core itself issued that 6,000 page document like three weeks ago that it was a one-day story in the national media that said well we kind of screwed up you know I think if you you have to recognize that report cost 20 million dollar of our taxpayers money they spend more money trying to cover their behinds with that report than they are actually spending on planning what we're going to do in the future I think the media didn't give it much play because they recognized that the two teams the our team and the guys from University California Berkeley had done very thorough jobs and they put all the science out there and really all the core could do was say yeah we screwed up and the

the important thing though is what happens next you know does the state take this and perhaps through the call we now know the levees failed because the call messed up so what happens next you've you've heard any talk that the state might sue the court um I'm quite sure that the state has given that a lot of thought and you know we'll have to see what comes out you're exercising for a man with your reputation must be described as unusual discretion and restraint but you you go back through the history of this system and talk about something that seems incredibly complex to the layman which is the definition of the standard project hurricane and that's what the core was was tasked to help protect us from talk a little bit about how they apparently define that downward the the original standard project

hurricane definition was put together in the late 1950s and it was a result of research at that time in 1965 congress ordered the flight control act and which dictated that we needed to build the levees around New Orleans the language said that we would build it to according to the standard project hurricane which was the most severe meteorological event that could happen okay so the call then went to the standard project hurricane definition from 1959 however the the weather bureau as it was then called the national weather service had realized well that definition's too weak so they updated it they updated it in 1973 they updated it in 1979 so that we were looking at basically a very very weak storm on the 1959 definition and a very very powerful category force storm

with the newer definition 20 years smarter but the call stayed with the old 1959 definition what's even more egregious but before you get to what's even more egregious I have to ask you why they chose to stay with the old definition because it made it meant you didn't have to make the levees as high so you could get more bounce for your buck okay well made it even more egregious is that the national weather service came up with some surge models and the and the the most famous or the one they use now is called slosh and the callvention is helped fund the development of slush this is a model of storm surge this is a model that allows you to predict storm surges for different hurricanes changing the size of the storm how fast it's moving and it's angle to the coast and so on so it's a powerful tool the slush the core need it never even use those in their designs even though they had helped pay for the development of the model and was

available from 1979 onwards most of the levees that failed were built in the 1990s 20 years after the slosh model came up you know so the more you look into this thing the more a standard one becomes because they ignored the soil data instead of using the actual soil strengths at say the 17 street with a levy fail they used an average which was a much stronger soil than the actual soil in the ground so they used something that had a strength of 300 pounds per square foot where the actual strength was 100 pounds per square foot they in some cases had come up the original design was a very very robust what we call t-wall design but they ignored that they went to eyeballs they shortened the sheet piles sheet piles are the steel pylings that they drove into the

top of the levees to anchor them in the soil beneath yes yes the the sheet piling is interlocking steel plates that they're driving the ground they have two functions one is to actually support the concrete wall that's built onto the top of them so they therefore stability and foundation the other is to they're a water barrier to stop water getting from the canals or the lakes underneath the levy system out onto the where the homes were if you have that water piping as we call it a percolating underneath the systems you can create the slippery surfaces and leave that would lead to the failure of the system which is exactly what happened in many cases and what was the what was the problem with the sheet pile system the day well if if you look let's say for example the 17 street canal the sheet piling went to 17 feet below sea level the canal is about two feet deeper it was very very soft soil if by way of comparison the repairs they've done

there now they've pushed the sheet piling in to over 70 feet so from 17 to 70 you know it gives you an idea of just how bad they misunderstood the soil strengths or as we now know how badly they miscalculated we are depending now in this area for the rebuilding of this system and for our protection in the current season and next season of hurricanes on the very same core of engineers you do not live in the New Orleans area if you did would you feel reassured by that prospect or anxious about it you know I guess the proverb they would hold you as once bitten twice shy and I think the core has learned a huge lesson and no matter how much they've stayed on spin

and you know that that there hasn't been a super amount of coverage they themselves as professionals you know I've got to be really shaken because their system failed the whole system the design the construction and on top of that along came some jerks from universities and they totally just proved the core theory on what went wrong so I think their professional attitudes the fact that they've really been hammered will ensure that they don't make this mistake a second time you say that and yet I remember in January they're repairing the levee on the industrial on the east side of the industrial canal and I think it was Dr. B was looking over their shoulder and saying you're using the wrong you're using soft soils again Dr. B prior to that one of our team members

and then after that myself on a different section of the levee yes they were using tan can and part of you know part of our role funded by the state was to wherever possible to check up on what they were doing and as well as trying to determine why the levees fell so you know it was after that that we suddenly heard the call was bringing these plays from from Mississippi so again it was a case in my opinion they were trying to cut corners and we caught them you know and not just we and Louisiana the Berkeley team as well yeah so my question as a resident part time of this community is are you and the Berkeley team still looking over their shoulder and how long will you be able to continue to do that we're going to look over their shoulders until the end of June which is when our contract runs out the Berkeley guys their contracts has run out we have both made recommendations that there needs to be an oversight team made up of

team Louisiana the Berkeley team and some folk from the American Society of Civil Engineers and we need to be reviewing everything that the call does both in terms of repair and designs for the future and in addition there should be some funding to go out and find the weak spots in the levees that we haven't found it because they are some other weak spots in the system so far that funding hasn't has materialized who would be who would be providing that funding ideally well while we suggested it should be FEMA because this sounds like a truly Kafka-esque scheme to be saved from the depredations of the core of engineers you have to turn to the kindly mercies of FEMA and the only reason being is that would fall into into their kind of response and recovery to us we'll be back with Dr. Ron here in moments from now but first the apologies of

the week I say the apology date line New York CBS Corporation Chief Executive Les Moonves said on Wednesday he was sorry about the bitter departure of newsman Dan Rather who left after protracted talks to renew his contract fell apart rather left CBS news on Monday despite his long-standing role as the face of the CBS newscast media watchers said Rather appeared to have been slowly pushed off the air since the reporting scandal over the story of George W. Bush's military record in the National Guard I'm sorry it ended the way it did Moonves told executives at price waterhouse Cooper there was no bigger role for him to plan anymore said Moonves of Rather had a very distinguished career I'm sorry he's leaving us Rather said this week it just isn't in me to sit around doing nothing he'd been on 60 minutes since he had to leave the evening news did eight

stories this year the last of which was a report on Whole Foods Market rumors persist that Dan Rather will be asked or has been in negotiations already to join a new project a relatively new project run by Dallas Maverick's owner Mark Cuban project called H.D. Net a high definition television network there's even about three million homes as you listeners know this broadcast was not heard in about two thirds of the country last week so I propose this story I'm giving you one more chance to hear what most likely is the very last version inspired by a story by the way before all of us became official it was a story in last week's New York Times it said Dan Rather gave an interview to the Times in which he said he'd been spending his time among other things

watching the movie Good Night and Good Luck in theaters five times once alone and that inspired as I say what this is the very last edition of bad days of Black Rock next here in the show some concession counter by Eastern for pork cracklings two weeks ago I haven't made a concession or not yet excuse me is this let's see taken no but it seems to me you've got a whole alcohol water brother Rather I know we're just taking alcohol you've waited like a midget in the wings for this moment Daniel's down he's fighting faster than a hobo in a marathon let's go taunt him in his Daniel I'm here because you're asleep you bring me here and that's no spare me the

sign-offs are please at least I had one one how many did you end up with last time I looked they didn't give people a awards for sign-offs they don't give them for document verification either still you get the metaphor in this movie sir the analogy less moon versus my McCarthy and my build payday is the owner of the Dallas Mavericks yes Daniel even your critics are saying it's sad that must be the hardest part my old never got pity for McCarthy as I remember you never forgave me did you brother conca I had a couple of chance conversations with our fearless leader about compulsory retirement for anchors at 65 and and then when you got the anchor chair you tried to hang on till add to pry your hands finger by finger off the arm rest and what was your big beef you didn't get enough work to do I'm a plough horse or not a show horse this vehicle came with

the expedition package standard equipment I'm like tumbleweed I will when I'm planted huh listen here's Daniel what do you think I got to do when I was eased out by certain forces you had your dust you had your assistant didn't you get to do that the series of documentaries yes for P freaking BS CVS and they couldn't afford documentaries what but the desk and the assistant every year so sir I sailed and attended board meetings not the worst life in the world keeps you from getting bitter you know mm-hmm those are the new wife oh she's great how's the old one though she's double great the kids playing me all wrong excuse me a motor I didn't say anything it was him hello Daniel Ed Murrow sir I'm so flattered you accepted the invitation to my unconscious to come

visit my dream anything to take a break from the spinning you know graves weren't built for it ideally they should be at least somewhat rounded you're watching this film again yes sir he think sees you and Bell Paley is the coach of the Mavericks I know I heard it from the wings like the midget Dan I had such hope for you when you well-bought past Roger mud to get the job I I saw a tough young not me exactly more like a country-fired Cullingwood well that's almost high praise indeed but excuse me brother what scoundrels did you help expose what scandals and shames did you wither under the spotlight of public knowledge you see my 60-minute speech in the whole foods empire last piece of mind will ever air on CBS CBS it's tough to laugh while I'm spinning don't make me do it this company is just the rump survivor of a financial deal by a tobacco

who unloaded it on a guy who made his fortune selling popcorn and dumps like this one well in fairness this is stadium seating brother Merle it hasn't been CBS for decades CBS had fresh apples on everyone's desks that was CBS I know it wasn't the same sir we we didn't even have apple sauce but I like to think we did our share of tough knuckled hard cajoni scuffed shoe leather reporting oboe grave the world learned about it first from your producer who was handed the photos which part of our pumps did she scuff up and brother Merle don't listen uncle Walter here he's a he's Turkish coffee bitter oh look don't get me started brother chronic I was a dignified prompt a reader he couldn't have gotten a documentary on the air of hithor and come back to life and been shot I always said we were just a glorified headline

service I thought that was a criticism till I saw what it looked like un glorified you know something three odd odd I invited you folks into my dream to give me some reassurance and some company by the way Daniel you do know you're watching the trailer the actual film is playing in cinema to and cinema to is closed for cleaning kick me out I was the only viewer in there damn wire service information all right Daniel you look you may not have always had the best strategy the best tools but you thought the good fight let's let's own surprisingly close to criticism but I'll take it brother Merle Ed I guess after all he preferred spending you want my advice brother rather your advice it would make me a ward speech humble

soup kitchen grateful don't hang on to the past if you want to do good work go boldly into the future do your good work for a channel that not even Dirk Novitsky gets on his cable it's win-win you know something brother Krunker I missed out on cable I missed out on the whole internet thing this home prize not going to miss the high definition train he's going to be bigger than French fries and fat free talo I sure hope so Daniel and if not those board meetings are a hoot now I'm going to go now we've got to date in an actual theater you take care Uncle Walter and and I'm sorry not pedophile priest sorry but dog in the trash sorry no lucky I lived 25 more years just so I could hear you say that so long brother rather I'd say my son off to you but who are the people are they elected are they appointed we're speaking to doctor I've

already heard in a deputy director of the LSU hurricane center we've now talked about the the core of engineers is being the cause of what happened to New Orleans but the the major attention was focused on the response and the wake of the flooding and there are those who say well this is not a primary federal responsibility it's a state and local responsibility you talk and site chapter well you cite the law the Stafford Act that talks about what happens in these kinds of emergencies FEMA was set up because the states didn't have the ability to handle these big destructions that's part of the reason we FEMA was set up as a result of various governors going to the wildhouse and saying we need a federal organization during the Clinton years FEMA was really built up to be a very very good operation that worked extremely well

unfortunately since then we've dismantled FEMA we've moved it into homeland security we took people out we put political appointees to run it if if you're going to be involved in disaster response and you're going to manage it you have to be somebody who's come up the ranks you know it's a trial by fire sort of saying you've got to be someone who's been through more than one disaster has felt it smelt it and and only then do you have some of the expertise needed to manage this one of the big failings with FEMA was that we didn't have those sorts of folk running the operation at what point did this become FEMA's responsibility for primary response and and had that been rehearsed during the hurricane Pam scenario of the year before

as soon as President Bush declared a state of national emergency FEMA's in charge federal government's in charge and that's the Saturday before landfall that's right and that's very clear in the Stafford Act so really that's when FEMA should have been movie in fact the Stafford Act actually has language that says FEMA should get involved in evacuations so you know 13 months before Katrina we had an exercise in Baton Rouge funded by FEMA now called the hurricane Pam exercise it was a far more catastrophic storm fictional storm but still than Katrina it flooded a much greater area more people died more people had to be evacuated and half a million people were going to be homeless and so on and so on and and and we spent 10 days going over this scenario and we had breakout teams they looked at how you do the rescue temporary housing so on and so on

so FEMA and they were there in force as was the US military as was the Corps of Engineers and a representative of the White House heard all the different things that could go wrong did an exercise and had a private consulting company produce some initial documentation so FEMA knew you know well before what exactly could go wrong or somewhere between doing the exercise and the actual response things broke down completely there's a there's an episode you talk about in the hurricane Pam period involving the issue of tent cities you know we realized years ago from our own research that if you had a storm like Katrina or something worse there would be hundreds of thousands of people who would be homeless and how do you deal with that

so I and one of my co-workers went overseas to do a course and the responses you build tent cities and we spent two weeks in England with experts in this from all over the world and went through how you set up the tent cities what do you need etc etc and how quickly you can do it so when I came back I was brimming with this energy oh we're going to have this exercise we must think about tent cities and FEMA's response was Americans don't live in tent cities kind of laughing at me it was like you know lady you're going to be crying you're going to be crying because how you're going to deal with them and exact look what happened we were bringing buses and airplanes and flying everybody everywhere so that New Orleans ended up being spread over all 50 states as you as you describe it in your book tent cities had they've been planned for would have had medical catering it would have been a city in terms of an actual set of needs catered

to as opposed to a super dome let's say I guess Americans do live in football stadiums yeah we lived in football stadiums all over the place people did live in tents for a long while on the own and now we live in in trailers all over the place the key thing is if you have a tent city as you bring people and you can do medical assessments you can get names you can find out what what sicknesses they have or what their medical requirements are you can have a clinic and you can have a big mess tent you can have meetings in the mess tent to help people for their paperwork how did what do you deal with your mortgage etc etc one of our biggest fears was as they pulled all these people out of New Orleans that we would see some folk with some very contagious disease spread all over the country and the next thing we got problems and that could have happened there were a number of there were about 11 persons who had the the very drug resistant TB you know and I took about three weeks to check them all down wow you know so

just imagine if we'd had something else so we were in some ways we were very lucky that we didn't see some disease spread over the country in in discussing matters of luck you say in the book that compared to all of the exercises that you'd run all of the predictions you'd done you're even now thinking that the supposed death toll from Katrina is a low figure since I wrote the book they've updated the numbers and what they recognize were a lot of the missing about 500 of the missing their homes aren't there their homes were completely destroyed by by the rapid flowing waters so there's a very good probability that they they didn't make it and you can imagine if the house is not there and they were in the 80s then they would have been

very early casualties you know one doesn't hope it gets much higher but you know it's going to end up around 1500 people I want to just backtrack to the the detective work that you and your team have been doing and you're you're gracious in sharing the credit for all the work and naming the people who've been working with you and paying tribute to them in the book you you know a lot about water depths and and elevations and you you have this kind of material in your in these very sophisticated databases do you have any I mean I just was in the lower ninth again yesterday and the thing that seems to separate that place and maybe St. Bernard I've been down to St. Bernard from the damage and lake view in mid city seems to the layman's eye to be the power of the water do you have any idea how fast the water was was coming at people in the lower ninth

and the lower ninth that the two breaches on the industrial canal the wall of water would have been 18 feet high so you can imagine a wall of water 18 feet high 500 feet wide all of a sudden like a dam just going at you it was strong enough that the first five streets the houses were totally destroyed you can go back 10 to 12 streets and you find houses that are moved off their foundations so the initial flood through there would have been absolutely horrendous that that whole St. Bernard ball of which the lower ninth is part experienced very high waters early in the process so they got water up to 12 feet above sea level and recognize there on average about sea level or just below so that 12 feet above sea level that's higher than most of the homes the eaves and many many

homes were totally submerged so St. Bernard the St. Bernard ball flooded by about 10 o'clock on the Monday the day the storm hit they'd had the peak of their flood the other two balls were different they broke actually as the levees failed as the surge was setting down and the levees broke and it took four days to fill those balls as Lake Pontch train drained into the city now you have this timeline explicated in the book and is your timeline collate with that animation that's been in the times picking you in the shows that they yes we you know we had long discussions with them and they used a lot of our data for them so people can see that if you go to nola.com there's a there's an animation that shows the pace and the the order in which breaches occurred and flooding occurred yeah we're actually working with some folk from the Netherlands to come up with

perhaps a little bit more accurate depiction but it's still shocking to me that Monday morning shortly before the hurricane makes landfall or shortly after the hurricane makes landfall the flooding begins and awareness of the flooding isn't widespread until Tuesday afternoon. That's right the the first flooding started at around 4.30 in the morning and by 11 o'clock it was over in terms of the breaches the actual as I said it took four days to fill up some of the balls what's absolutely incredible to us is that the word never got out even though key people knew you know the city knew femenu the core of engineers knew but the word never got out until we started seeing the imagery on some of the TV networks around just off the lunch on Tuesday and some of the

local radio stations in New Orleans started to say hey we're in trouble you know the waters the levees are failed so what's important there is a it indicates communications were bad or somebody was holding on to the information and then wanted to get out oh like you could keep that a secret well nobody acknowledged all the breaches until we got on an airplane and flew around and told the media hey we've counted 28 major breaches and you know there's probably another 30 or 40 little ones but the point I wanted to make is what when many people don't realize is residence after the storm if they didn't live close to a breach went outside said oh we've dodged the baller lovely sunny afternoon yeah went to bed early because there's no radio no TV no electricity etc for most of them went to bed early woke up in the middle of the night the water was lapping on the sides of their beds they tasted it it was salty all they could do it was dark

was go up the addicts now if you've ever tried to punch a hole through your attic through your roof you'll realize how tough a job it is well you're you're having to carve upward carve upwards but you've got plywood that's covered by top paper that's covered by asphalt tiles it's a very very robust structure you know unless you have the right tools or you're pretty strong it's very very difficult to break through those addicts and you know some of the TV imagery in the beginning you saw firemen that coast guard folks with axes actually pounding into the roofs and they were getting people out what was tough for us was we were mapping all the 911 calls and a lot of these were coming from people in their addicts they couldn't get out and the best day we had was the the state police rescued 79 people out of their addicts who would never have got out

and that was like after a week you know how they kept their batteries alive for a week I don't know but uh so a lot of folk unfortunately drowned in the addicts or died in the addicts because they weren't found you've studied as part of your work uh not just the disasters in this area but disasters around the world in May I was in San Francisco and the Chronicle did a series of looking back at the San Francisco earthquake on its centenary and I was struck by the report of the response after the San Francisco earthquake two things uh stuck with me one congress assembled in session at four o'clock the next morning to appropriate aid and two that the army requisitioned all available tents and sent them to San Francisco for a tent city yes we've come a long way in a hundred years

you know if you look at the Hurricane Andrew store 13 14 years ago and the response to that it was as bad as Katrina the response was yeah and this was in Florida this was in Florida homestead Florida you know near Miami many say a part of the first bushes down four was reflected in the fact that there was this failed response to Hurricane Andrew then we built up a wonderful response organization but in the last six years we totally dismantled it so that here today in 2006 we're probably no better off than we were in 1906 with and it's an absolute shame when you think about how much money has been put into homeland security and these other agencies that FEMA is part of there are those who use this as an object lesson in the uh the

futility of depending on the federal government for anything anybody who's lived here uh knows what heroes the Coast Guard was during this disaster CDC you talk about in your book what a professional heads up focused agency that is how can it be that one of these agencies is such a heads up agency and another is such a head of its ass agency I think the differences CDC's run by professionals medical professionals uh you know they respond to disasters all over the world they really understand their mission and and and their whole structure is aimed at their mission in the case of FEMA we didn't have disaster professionals running it and and and and that's reflected in their lack of appreciation of how bad the situation was

and the lack of response so you know what's key is is who's running the organization you know CDC has had some tough times in the bush years with the budget cuts but they've still from from what we've seen kept their eye on the ball unfortunately they didn't happen with FEMA more with Dr. Ren here than in a moment you continuing our conversation with Dr. Ivor van Herden deputy director of the LSU hurricane

center let's talk about you a little bit uh you've been very outspoken uh there's a piece in the New York Times a few weeks ago that said you've got leaned on a little bit um you are not tenured no I could be laid off for 24 hours notice wow and yet you continue to sound the alarm you know to me it's a it's a it's a case of principles and the principle here is that we didn't do what we needed to do I'm in the position because of the research that was that was funded through my center of having a very good understanding of what we're wrong and what could go wrong in the future so it would be very wrong for me just to keep quiet you know the the bottom line is the truth has to be out and uh what we were seeing during Katrina was that the truth wasn't getting her and if you think about science science is actually a quest

for the truth if you want to know how something works or why does this plant grow you really just trying to find out the truth of our growth so for us it was an easy step to say to go from he has the science he has what we've seen wrong and yeah what we see needs to be done I say an easy step but there were there were a large number of roadblocks put in the way you mentioned a few minutes ago the Netherlands and I think a lot of people in New Orleans right about now are wondering we've seen state delegations go over to the Netherlands we've seen delegations from the Netherlands come over here they are reported by what we can see to have a state-of-the-art flood control and water management system part of which was inspired by their disastrous floods and their visit over here why don't we just hire them to do this that's what I would do you know the problem is the core of engineers is a huge huge organization

and it's totally dependent on these earmarks and these projects against from congress to survive and they and their supporters are not about to say oh we're going to bring outsiders in and do it you know so behind all of this maneuvering and political stuff is the fact the core engineers wants to hang on to the role it has in society it wants to still be the nations engineers it still wants to build all these projects and have all this money and of course there's a large number of companies that benefit from these projects and so they don't want to see the core disappear so they keep the lobbyists have funded and the lobbyists try and get the money for the core and so we have this this kind of circle and none of those people in that circle want to see it broken and that's the problem and in the Netherlands do you have the lead agency being

basically a contracting agency and and multiple tiers of subcontractors that we have with the core yes so the kind of similar but the big differences they are reviews design reviews so if somebody comes up with a design it gets reviewed by multiple groups independent reviews so that they can assess it they do risk and probability analysis so they understand what the risk is is that we're going to be overtopped in but most importantly all major projects are put out as design competitions just as we would if we were going to build a new skyscraper here in New Orleans we put it out for design competition to architects and then we take the best design that's what they do in the Netherlands and then they have these independent teams they go through the designs and they then choose the the relevant design and in that way you get the brain power of everybody distributed brain power yes not just those select few within your

organisation I understand there's one other difference that we we're building for a hundred year flood and they're building for 10,000 years in fact we now know that most of New Orleans levees aren't even 100 year flood levees they less and they take a 10,000 year view when you go to the Netherlands you realise that we could restore everything in Louisiana we could have secure levees systems we could ensure that we never get another Katrina you know the Dutch have done it they are a small country 16 million people you know we're a huge country with enormous resources they said in in their equivalent to Katrina 1953 they lost 1800 Dutch men and that's never going to happen again in Katrina we lost 1500 Americans are we going to ensure that that never

happens again if we are then we need to do what the Dutch did and that's built the right levees systems and restore the wetlands yeah I didn't want to let this conversation end without talking about the wetlands which you do with with a great mixture of urgency and poetry in your book what has to be done with regard to the wetlands of of Louisiana well I think number one we we have to recognise that they are the buffer to the surges and then we need to restore them and they're two important things we could we could be doing right now out out a line of defence of the barrier islands we could go offshore and federal waters and there's high quality sands we could mind those sands and rebuild the barrier islands in just a few years you know that's something we can start with tomorrow a lot of the planning has already been done by different state agencies just just to connect a dot here barrier islands and wetlands actually mitigate the ferocity of a hurricane

before it makes landfalls correct that's great it sucks both wind energy out of the system and knocks down the surge so if we the next important thing is the Mississippi River built coastal Louisiana over the last 8000 years all we got to do is let the river loose so that it can maintain the wetlands and build new wetlands right now the Mississippi River is a canal that flows through Louisiana to the Gulf of Mexico and all that goodness all that sediment all that soil all those nutrients go straight out into the sea into deep water so if we could divert those if we could have diversion siphons you know all kinds of different structures we could get those nutrients and sediments that life giving material back into the wetlands and really restore the wetlands then we need to really think about one levy system for the whole coast instead of all these

multiple little systems of different designs we need to kind of like the dutch to draw a line in the sand and say we're going to build this levy system if you think of it this way the homes in the infrastructure would be protected by the levy the super levy if you restore the wetlands the wetlands then protect your levy's and you restore the barrier islands your barrier islands then protect your wetlands you're talking about redundancy exactly but using nature rather than concrete how's your sailboat my sailboat's fine every time I see it it says when are we going sailing and I have to say sorry not not for a while Dr. Ryan here again I very appreciative of all your work and what people have heard today is just the tip of the iceberg of what you've been doing for this area and whatever and we should all be I guess asking our congressman to fund you guys to keep

looking over the shoulder of the core yeah yeah yeah we need to we need to do that but oh thank you for this invitation this opportunity to share thanks again one thing more Afghanistan's president Hamad Karzai has attacked Britain the United States and other nations with troops in Afghanistan calling on them to quote reassess the manner in which the war on terror is conducted as the death toll in Afghanistan passed 604 weeks the Afghan president who was seen support for his government collapse in the violent and economically stagnant south of the country in recent months distances himself from the military operations there quote it is not acceptable for us that in all this fighting Afghans are dying he said unquote Taliban is increasing their PR while the Afghan government issued a directive banning Afghan journalists from filming or interviewing members of the Taliban

one tape put out by the Taliban features two singers engaging in a imagined debate in a style not dissimilar to that of American rappers nudist from outside the bubble for your listening pleasure ladies and gentlemen that's going to conclude this week's edition of the show the program returns next week at the same time over these same stations you know the litany my thanks to dr evor i have or i've already heard deputy director of the lsu hurricane center and author of the new book the storm my thanks to scott at piety street recording the studio the stars and to gen and bob done here at wwno for helping to make today's program possible so the show comes to you from centri of progress productions and originates with the facilities of

kc rw Santa Monica a community recognized around the world is the home of the homeless so long for new the