Author raises a storm about the handling of Hurricane Katrina

By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Ivor van Heerden is angry.
He is angry because years of warnings about the hurricane danger to New Orleans were largely ignored.
He is angry because federal disaster planners dismissed his recovery proposals a year before Hurricane Katrina struck.
And he is angry about the bungled response to the storm and the continuing political bickering.
This anger comes through loud and clear in van Heerden's book "The Storm," a look at last summer's disastrous hurricane and how unprepared officials were to deal with it.
Van Heerden is in a position to know. He's deputy director of Louisiana State University's hurricane center and has been trying for years to get the attention of authorities to restore wetlands, strengthen levees and take other steps to get ready for the inevitable storm.
In the wake of the storm, "I began getting angry. As the days advanced I got angrier. New Orleans had not even been in the bull's-eye for this storm, which also turned out to be less powerful than expected. Nevertheless, much of the city was going under with the whole world watching in disbelief," he writes.
Katrina was both a natural disaster and a systemic failure by the nation, he says. "Together they produced the tragedy."
A year before Katrina, disaster planners held an exercise called Hurricane Pam, designed to help prepare for a major storm in New Orleans.
Van Heerden suggested having large numbers of tents on hand so tent cities could be set up to rapidly house evacuees.
"The FEMA folks not only refused to entertain the idea, they basically laughed me out of the room," van Heerden reports. He recalls one official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency as telling him: "Americans don't live in tents."
"Americans need to understand that their government is totally unprepared for major natural disasters, let alone the terrorist's dirty bomb or biological-chemical attack," he writes.
"It's now or never" to get ready for the next storm, van Heerden concludes. "Now is the time to put politics, egos, turf wars and profit agendas aside. We owe it to the thirteen-hundred Americans who died in the Katrina tragedy."