Le Show; 2006-08-27

From deep inside your radio. For the final week from Edinburgh, Scotland, ladies and gentlemen, starting as one should, with the buried lead. This from an associated press story that starts with the words, President Bush has authorized the US Marine Corps to recall 2,500 troops to active duty because there are not enough volunteers returning for duty in Afghanistan and Iraq. Not really big news, but we go down 45 paragraphs, not totally buried, head peeping up, visible in the rubble. And we get to this, a quote from Marine colonel Guy A Stratton, head of manpower mobilization. Quote, Since this is going to be a long war, we thought it was judicious and prudent at this time to be able to use a relatively small portion of those Marines to help us augment our units. It's going to be a long war, ladies and gentlemen. This just in.

This is a special edition of the broadcast, so we're going to get a few things done first, including news from outside the bubble. Copyrighted feature, of course. Who wouldn't copyrighted? From the age in Australia, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad set himself an August 22nd deadline to respond to the security council's demands and the package of incentives regarding his nuclear program. In the days leading up to August 22nd, the possibility that the world might have ended within days was apparently contemplated by some US officials. It was taken seriously by the Wall Street Journal, which ran a piece by eminent Islamic scholar Bernard Lewis, known to be close to the White House, which pointed to the significance of August 22nd in the Islamic calendar. This was the day, according to the Muslim faith that the Prophet Muhammad ascended to

heaven on a winged horse before returning to earth. The day Lewis wrote when some Muslims, including President Ahmadinejad, believed the world will end. Lewis went on to say it was possible that the President had chosen August 22nd for his response to the resolution, because, quote, it might be deemed an appropriate day for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and if necessary of the world. He continued, it would be wise to bear the possibility of such cataclysmic events in mind. So it's just in the world at night and on August 22nd, it would be wise to remember that too. Data line Tokyo, also from the age, the international black market and nuclear weapons parts involves a Japanese company that's one of the world's biggest precision instruments makers. According to Tokyo police, who have now made a series of arrests, five executives of meet tutorial corporation are accused of illegally exporting instruments that were

convertible for use in nuclear weapons. Let's put sanctions on the Japanese. The company makes finally calibrated measurement devices, including machines that can be used in the uranium enrichment process. The order for the measuring devices was placed by a Malaysian company, follow me now, scomi precision engineering, which was set up by rogue Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Khadir Khan. There's that name again. There's that country again. Also from the age in Australia, data line Baghdad, the plans are a state secret. So just where the Starbucks and Krispy Kreme stores will be as a mystery, but as the concrete hulks of a huge 21 building complex rise from the ashes of Baghdad, Washington is sending a clear message to Iraqis, we're here to stay. George W. Bush's palace as the locals have dubbed the new US Embassy in Baghdad is designed as a suburb of Washington, an army of more than 3,500 diplomatic and support staff will

have their own sports center, beauty parlor and swimming pool. The site was a gift from the Iraqi government. Now has a built-in surface to air missile station. Its entire construction force is foreign. After almost four years says the age, the Americans still can't turn on the lights for the Iraqis, but that won't be a problem at the embassy, the same with the toilets. They will always flush on command. All services for the biggest embassy in the world will operate independently from the rattle trap utilities of the Iraqi capital. The fortress is bigger than the Vatican. It dwarfs the edifices of Saddam's wildest dreams. And according to the newspaper, irritates the hell out of ordinary Iraqis. A detailed new report issued this week from Britain's top foreign policy think tank, the World Institute of International Affairs says Iran's influence in Iraq has superseded that of the United States. And it's increasingly rivaling the U.S. as the main actor at the crossroads between the Middle East and Asia.

We're not acting. We're improvising. The report says the Bush administration has directly helped strengthen Iran to become a major regional power. The war on terror removed the Taliban and Saddam Hussein Iran's two greatest regional rivals and strengthened Iran's regional leverage in doing so. Israel's failure to defeat Hezbollah has reinforced Iran's position as the region's focal point against U.S. policy. But here's the cute in this report from the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. Quote, while the U.S. has been playing poker in the region, Iran has been playing chess. Iran is playing a longer, more clever game and has been far more successful at winning hearts and minds. It says one of the authors of the report. Hey, poker is good. Poker is big. I don't see any chess shows on cable, babe. In a rare political statement, Iran's, sorry, Iraq's most prominent Shiite. Can I say that on the radio?

Religious leader has urged government ministers and members of parliament in Iraq to refrain from taking trips abroad and to remain in Iraq to focus on improving the lives of ordinary citizens. That's Grant Ayatollah Sistani, sir, would you please make the same request of Mayor Negan and New Orleans? It's equally necessary. News from outside the bubble that copyrighted feature and another special feature rarely heard on this broadcast. Oh, this is too good to not share. A headline in some editions of Wednesday's food section referred to 1968 as the Summer of Love. 1967 was known as the Summer of Love. This is Lesho and every couple months this year we've been having discussions about New Orleans, Louisiana. 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 in its 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 the big question. 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 not doing a straight line. I was zigzagging and after two and a half hours I got numb and gave up. Well, 45 minutes by 45 minutes gives you a fairly large chunk of property and it's just to try and get them to understand that this is not just one subdivision. This is not just a small part of the town next to some lake or something. This is a very, very significant part of greater New Orleans 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 are still dead from the salt water. 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 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 online, 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 stands out?

I think the other thing that really stands out and this is a result of I think some right-wing 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, they 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 serves them right, they should have got out which is so, so wrong. Now 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 they're in wheelchairs and it's their fault that they don't own a vehicle and can't drive out. Personally for me as I go around the country and as I read the media, even I know 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 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 that aspect of the Katrina story wasn't as newsworthy as the original first fourteen days 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, 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 failure.

If that hadn't happened, we wouldn't be talking about Katrina right now. It 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 that Dr. B of the UC Berkeley team used, I propose you're just saying, has planted itself in my mind. He said, without the levees failing, we would have had wet ankles. Exactly. 15% of the water that got into New Orleans came from over topping the levees. That's all the water that would have been in the city if the levees hadn't have failed. And it would have been pumped out fairly rapidly because the pumps would have still worked, right? Yeah. It would have been very easy to get them out. 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 get New Orleans back on its feet. Your involvement in this has been longstanding.

You've studied the risk. You've made predictions and made them public in ways that even got you in trouble with your superiors at the university to say this is a danger that's facing us, which is why I said at the beginning that 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 referred to the smoking gun of the Vicksburg documents. Can you, in brief, outline what that tells us? What that document tells us and others we now have is that the core of engineers never put a great focus on getting the levees done. It was more at chore that they had to do. And in fact, there were cost-cutting measures all the way through the process. Some of them, because of the cause, own problems with the money, whether it went too much

or went to administration or whatever, some of it because local politicians and levee 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 they've stayed on their story from day one. 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 not at fault. And we knew from basically Tuesday evening that there wasn't true from our own initial research. What do you think about the report that the core itself issued at 6,000 page document like three weeks ago that was a one-day story in the national media that said, well, you kind of screwed up.

You know, I think if you have to recognize that report costs $20 million 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 R team and the Gasserum University, California, Berkeley had done very thorough jobs and had put all the science out there. And really all the core could do was say, yeah, we screwed up. And the important thing though is what happens next. Does the state take this and perhaps sue the core? We now know the levees failed because the core messed up. So what happens next? You've heard any talk that the state might sue the core? I'm quite sure that the state has given that a lot of thought and we'll have to see what

comes out. You're exercising for a man with your reputation must be described as an usual discretion and restraint. But 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 that's what the core was tasked to help protect us from. Talk a little bit about how they apparently defined that downward. 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 which dictated that we needed to build the levees around New Orleans. The language said that we would build it according to the standard project hurricane, which was the most severe meteorological event that could happen.

So the core then went to the standard project hurricane definition from 1959. However, 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 forced storm with the newer definition 20 years smarter. But the core stayed with the old 1959 definition. What's even more egregious is... 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 meant you didn't have to make the levees as high, so you could get more bounce for your buck. What made it even more egregious is that the National Weather Service came up with some surge

models and the most famous or the one they use now is called Slosh. And the core venture is helped fund the development of Slosh. 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 its angle to the coast and so on. So it's a powerful tool, the Slosh. The core need, it never even used 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. So the more you look into this thing, the more astounded one becomes because they ignored the soil data.

Instead of using the actual soil strengths at, say, the 17th street where the levee failed, 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. 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. The sheet piles are the steel pilings that they drove into the top of the levees to anchor them in the soil beneath, yes? Yes, the sheet pile is interlocking steel plates that they drive in the ground, they have two functions. One is to actually support the concrete wall that's built onto the top of them, so they're for stability and foundation. The other is to, they're a water barrier to stop water, getting from the canals or the

lakes, underneath the levee system out onto the, where the homes were. If you have that water piping, as we call it, and percolating underneath the systems, you can create the slippery surfaces, and 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 that they? Well, if, if you look, let's say, for example, the 17th street canal, the sheet pile and went to 17 feet below sea level, the canal is about two feet deeper. It was very, very soft soil, by way of comparison, the repairs they've done there now, they've pushed the sheet pile in a note 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 all, as we now know, how badly they must calculate it.

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 shot. And I think the core has learned a huge lesson. And no matter how much they've stayed on spin and, you know, that there hasn't been a super amount of coverage, they themselves as professionals, you know, have got to be really shaken because their system failed, the horses, the design, the construction. And on top of that, along came some jerks from universities and they totally disproved

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 levy 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 soft soils again. Dr. B, prior to that one of our team members and then after that myself, on a different section of the levy. Yes, they were using sand 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 levy's failed. So, you know, it was after that that we suddenly heard the core was bringing these plays 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. Now, 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 core 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 yet, because they are some other weak spots in the system. So far, that funding hasn't materialized. Who would be providing that funding, ideally? Well, what we suggested it should be FEMA. 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 their kind of response and recovery to us. We're speaking to Dr. Eivor van Herden, a deputy director of the LSU Hurricane Center. We've now talked about the core of engineers as being the cause of what happened to New Orleans, but 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. FEMA was set up because the states didn't have the ability to handle these big catastrophes. That's part of the reason FEMA was set up as a result of various governors going to the White House and saying, we need a federal organisation. 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 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. 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 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 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 moving. 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, 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 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, had 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 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 response is 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, et cetera, et cetera, 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 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 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 their 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 in, 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 fill out paperwork, how did what you do with your mortgage, et cetera, et cetera. 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 very drug-resistant TB, and it took about three weeks to check them all down. So just imagine if we had something else, so in some ways we were very lucky that we didn't see some disease spread over the country. 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. Once I wrote the book, they've updated the numbers and what they recognized were a lot of the missing, about 500 of the missing, their homes aren't there, their homes were completely destroyed by the rapid-flowing waters, so there's a very good probability that they didn't make it, and you can imagine if the house is not there and they were in their 80s, then they would have been very early casualties. One doesn't hope it gets much higher, but it's going to end up around 1,500 people. I want to just backtrack to the detective work that you and your team have been doing and 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 know a lot about water depths and elevations, and you have this kind of material 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 haven't been down to St. Bernard from the damage in Lakeview and 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 coming at people in the lower ninth? In 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 the wall of water 18 feet high, 500 feet wide, all of a sudden like a dam, I'm just going at you. There 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 whole St. Bernard bowl 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 recognized their, 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 bowl 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 bowls 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 bowls, as Lake Ponce trained 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 time-speak you and it shows that they've... Yes. We had long discussions with them and they used a lot of our data for that. So people can see that, if you go to nola.com, there's an animation that shows the pace and the order in which breaches occurred and flooding occurred. 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 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, took four days to fill up some of the bowls. What's absolutely incredible to us is that the word never got out. Even though key people knew, the city knew, Fema knew, 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 levees are failed. So what's important there is, hey, it indicates communications were bad or somebody was holding on to the information and didn't want it to get out. Oh, I'd like to 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 many people don't realize is residents after the storm, if they didn't live close to a breach, went outside and said, oh, we're dodged the ball. Lovely sunny afternoon. 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, it was go up the adics. 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 having to carve upwards. Carve upwards, but you've got plywood that's covered by tar paper, that's covered by asphalt tiles, it's a very, very robust structure, you know, unless you have the right tool,

or you're pretty strong, it's very, very difficult to break through those adics. And you know, some of the TV imagery in the beginning, you saw firemen at 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 adics and they couldn't get out. And the best day we had was the state police rescued 79 people out of the adics 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 so a lot of folks unfortunately drowned in the adics or died in the adics because they weren't found.

You've studied as part of your work, 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 stuck with me. Then Congress assembled in session at four o'clock the next morning to appropriate aid. And two, that the army requisitioned all available tents in San Francisco for a tent city. 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. And this was in Florida. This was in Florida. Homestead Florida, you know, near Miami. Many say a part of the first bushes downfall 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 them. 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, the futility of depending on the federal government for anything.

Anybody who's lived here knows what hero's 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 up a task agency. I think the differences CDC's run by professionals, medical professionals, you know, they respond to disasters all over the world. They really understand their mission and their whole structure is aimed at their mission. In the case of FEMA, we didn't have disaster professionals running it 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 budget cuts, but they've still from what we've seen kept the eye on the ball. Unfortunately, that didn't happen with FEMA. Anticipating the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the wave of coverage that is already upon us and is to come, the show is repreasing our interview with Dr. Iver von Hearden of the LSU Hurricane Center and there's more from Dr. von Hearden moments from now, but first ladies and gentlemen, the apologies of the week. The Makaka controversy refuses to die, Virginia Senator George Allen apologized directly to SR Siddharth. On Wednesday, telling the 20-year-old Democratic campaign staffer that he, Allen, was sorry for offending him, Siddharth, with remarks that have generated nationwide criticism for being racially insensitive.

Allen called Siddharth by phone. First contact between the two since Allen was caught by Siddharth's video camera calling him, Siddharth, a Makaka. Siddharth said Allen told him the apology was, quote, from his heart. His main point was he was sorry he offended me, says Siddharth, a University of Virginia student. He realized how much he offended me from the comments I made in the media. Allen also told Sean Hannity that he was sorry on Hannity's nationwide radio talk show host. I take full responsibility. I'm not offering any excuses because I said it and no one else said it, referring to the word Makaka, which is believed to be a racial epithet, referring to a genus of monkey. Allen continued on Hannity show it's a mistake. I apologize and from my heart, I'm very, very sorry I said it. He also apologized at a retirement community saying, quote, from the deepest part of my heart, I'm sorry and I will do better.

When he arrived at the Shenandoah Valley to take a factory tour, the local NBC affiliate demanded another apology. I made a mistake. Allen obliged it was a mistake and I'm sorry for it, very sorry for it and I'm going to try to do better. Then the ABC affiliate wanted to talk to him, oh goodness, the senator said I regretted it was a mistake, I'm solely responsible for it and I'm very, very sorry. More to come. Virgin Atlantic Airways has apologized to passengers, trapped on a jet for seven hours and offered a free flight and compensation. Police were called to the plane as officials feared a riot after the packed 747 sat on the runway at Gatwick Airport because of a string of technical problems. 8.63 finally left for its destination, Cuba, 27 hours late. Things still did not go smoothly. Takeoff was delayed because the plane was dirty and had not been refueled. Virgin says, we apologize for the inconvenience and frustration caused. We have launched an investigation, passengers have each been offered tickets for a free

return flight in the future or a full refund if they choose not to take the plane. Cuba. If light a cuba from Britain, ladies and gentlemen, teen singer Cassie, don't say who, has apologized to fans for her lackluster life performances. The 19-year-old posted a message on her MySpace page, owned by Rupert Murdock, insisting she's desperately trying to improve her stage shows. She writes, quote, I am aware that my life performances have been pretty bad. I'm still getting over stage fright, I don't know the feeling babe. Four British media organizations, three of them tabloid newspapers have apologized after publishing and broadcasting pictures of Kosher Zaman, 24-year-old British citizen and employee of the city of London, mistakenly identifying her as Kosher Ali, who's been arrested in connection with a suspected airliner terrorism plot. One of Ms. Zaman's lawyers said, following the apologies, she will be pursuing damage claims from the newspapers and independent television news.

Apparently, apologies aren't always enough, ladies and gentlemen, don't tell George Allen. The apologies of the week a copyrighted feature of this broadcast. Continuing our conversation with Dr. Ivor Von Herden, deputy director of the LSU Hurricanes Center. Let's talk about you a little bit. You've been very outspoken. There was a piece in the New York Times a few weeks ago that said, you've got leaned on a little bit. You are not tenured? 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 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 funded through my center of having a very good understanding of what went wrong and what could go wrong in the future.

So it would be very wrong for me just to keep quiet. You know, the bottom line is the truth has to be on. And what we were seeing during Katrina was that the truth wasn't getting up. 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're 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 see in wrong, and here what we see needs to be done. I say an easy step, but 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 are guests 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. So behind all of this maneuvering and political stuff is the fact the core of engineers wants to hang on to the role it has in society. It wants to still be the nation's 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 kind of circle. And none of those people in that circle want to see it broken. That's the problem. And in the Netherlands, do you have the lead agency being basically a contracting agency and multiple tiers of subcontractors that we have with the core here? Yes. So 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 every going to be overtopped in.

But most importantly, all major projects are put out as design competitions. Just as we were, 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 that go through the designs and they then choose 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'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 levies aren't even 100 year flood levies, 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 levy systems.

We could ensure that we never get another Katrina. The Dutch have done it. There are small countries, 16 million people. We're a huge country with enormous resources. They said in their equivalent to Katrina in 1953, they lost 1,800 Dutchmen and that's never going to happen again. In Katrina, we lost 1,500 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 levy systems and restore the wetlands. I didn't want to let this conversation end without talking about the wetlands, which you do with a great mixture of urgency and poetry in your book. What has to be done with regard to the wetlands of Louisiana? I think number one, 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 that we could be doing right now. Not to add a line of defence of the barrier islands. We could go offshore and federal waters and there's high quality sands. We could mine those sands and rebuild the barrier islands in just a few years. That's something we can start with tomorrow. A lot of the planning has already been done by different state agencies. Just to connect a dot here, barrier islands and wetlands actually mitigate the ferocity of a hurricane before it makes landfiles, that's correct. That's great. It sucks both wind energy out of the system and knocks down the surge. So the next important thing is the Mississippi River built coastal Louisiana over the last 8,000 years. All we've 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, 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 berry islands, your berry islands then protect your wetlands. You're talking about redundancy.

Exactly. But using nature, rather than concrete. Dr. Ron here again, very appreciative of all your work 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. We need to do that, but thank you for this invitation and this opportunity. Thanks again. Ladies and gentlemen, Apropos, Dadeline New Orleans and New Orleans couple waited nearly a year for a FEMA trailer only to have it explode minutes after they got inside. Fire officials say flammable vapors somehow ignited causing an explosion and a rolling wave of fire throughout the trailer that causes under investigation.

My bet from aldehyde fumes, they've already been investigating that. And the new planet definition that relegates Pluto to dwarf planet status is drawing intense criticism from astronomers, I'm just amazed activists haven't demanded that it be redefined as a little people object. Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes this edition of the show from Edinburgh, Scotland, the program returns next week at the same time from New Orleans over the same stations. It would be just like the media getting it right on New Orleans for a change if you'd agree to be with me then. Would you? All right. Thank you very much. The email address for this broadcast is limb mail, L-E-M-A-I-L, at interworld.net, La Show Internet Services by Steve Mac, a tip of the La Show shoppo to the San Diego and Pittsburgh desks. La Show playlist available at harryshearer.com. And thanks to Graham Warman and Chris at Radio 4th here in Edinburgh, Scotland for helping with today's broadcast.

And there's always a tip of the La Show shoppo, the Pam Hallstedt. By the way, Dr. Run Heardin's book about Katrina the Causes and the Consequences is the Storm. La Show comes to you from century of progress productions that originates through the facilities of KCRW's Santa Monica community recognized around the world as the home of the homeless, so long from Edinburgh.