Ivor Van Heerden

Ivor Van Heerden

Dr. Ivor van Heerden, Ph.D., holds a doctorate degree in Marine Sciences and was the deputy director of the Louisiana State University (LSU) Hurricane Center, before being dismissed by LSU following Hurricane Katrina. He is also the director of the Center for the Study of Public Health Impacts of Hurricanes.

Van Heerden was born on September 21, 1950 in Johannesburg, South Africa. He grew up in Natal. He has one daughter, Vanessa van Heerden, and one step daughter, Julia James. He created a hurricane modeling program at LSU. For the last decade he has been one of the most persistent voices warning of the inevitable effects of a major hurricane on the Louisiana coast. He was one of several hundred participants at the Hurricane Pam exercise in July 2004. He claims that his warnings during the Hurricane Pam exercise were ignored, which may have contributed to the Hurricane Katrina disaster. He has also taken the Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) to task for their misdesigns which caused the Levee failures in Greater New Orleans, 2005. For a time LSU told him not to talk to the media, amid concerns that his book The Storm was endangering federal grant money flowing to the university.(The Storm, published in 2006, offered his analysis of Katrina and the levee disasters.)

On 9 April 2009 LSU announced it would not renew van Heerden's contract, effective the end of the spring semester 2010. Van Heerden said he was not offered any reason. Van Heerden spoke to Harry Shearer on his Le Show radio program on 12 April 2009 and said, "I learned about not being deputy director through the news media. They basically didn't have the guts to tell me that to my face.... They couldn't tell me why and wouldn't tell me why."

In an editorial letter to the Times-Picayune, Charles E. Settoon criticized Dr. van Heerden for allegedly offering "engineering services" and that he had represented himself "as an engineer publicly without having a professional engineer's license" and consequently, that he was a legal liability for his employer, LSU.

Van Heerden was strongly defended in the Louisiana press. An especially tart assailment of LSU's administration appeared in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, from James A. Cobb Jr., attorney and adjunct professor in LSU-rival Tulane University's School of Law, whose letter to the editor ended thus:

Academic freedom and intellectual integrity are, at LSU, like two distant cousins who haven't spoken to each other in many, many years.

Flagship university? Please.

In an interview cited in the New York Times, van Heerden voiced suspicion that his "slow-motion" firing was timed to the opening—on Monday, April 20—of a multibillion-dollar civil suit in federal court against the USACE over the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet Canal (MR-GO). The suit alleges the "short-cut" canal

caused environmental degradation of the wetlands and greatly increased the effect of, causing the flooding in such areas as St. Bernard Parish and the city’s Lower Ninth Ward. Dr. van Heerden is expected to testify in case, and he said "I think that’s the timing — to try to discredit me."