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ECONOMIC HIT MEN AND THE NEXT DROWNING OF NEW ORLEANS
Hurricane Bush Four Years Later, Part 2
by Greg Palast
For Crooks and Liars, Thursday, August 27, 2009
This week only, our readers can download,
free of charge, Greg Palast's film, "Big Easy to Big Empty: The
Untold Story of the Drowning of New Orleans." Or donate and
get a signed DVD. Watch the 1-minute trailer ...
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Who put out the hit on van Heerden?
Ivor van Heerden is the professor at Louisiana State University's
Hurricane Center who warned the levees of New Orleans were ready to
blow — months and years before Katrina did the job.
For being right, van Heerden was rewarded with ... getting fired. [See Katrina, Four Years Later: Expert Fired Who Warned
Levees Would Burst]
But I've been in this investigating game long enough to know that van
Heerden's job didn't die of natural causes or academic issues. This was
a hit. Some very powerful folks wanted him disappeared and silenced —
for good.
So who done it?
Here are the facts.
Dr. van Heerden has lots of friends, mostly the people of New Orleans,
those who survived and cheered his fight to save their city. But he
also has enemies, many of them, and they are powerful.
First, there is Big Oil. More than a decade ago, van Heerden pointed
the finger at oil drilling as a culprit in threatening New Orleans and
the Gulf Coast with flooding.
"Certainly he was critical of what the oil companies did to the coast,"
Louisiana engineer HJ Bosworth told me. "Seeing what kind of bad
citizens they were. Dozens and dozens of pipeline canals just carved
the living daylights out of the coast just to find some oil."
Well, we need oil, don't we?
True, but Bosworth, who advises Levees.org, a non-profit group that
birddogs hurricane safety work, explained the connection between
flooding New Orleans and oil drilling quantified by van Heerden's
research. "Takes a million years to build (the protective coastal
marsh); once you carve it up, it's just like bleeding a wild animal,
hang it up, carve some holes in it, and the juice just drains out of
it. Saltwater and tide invade. You make [the state] susceptible to
flooding from coastal and tidal surges."
![]() So I was amazed to learn that, shortly after van Heerden,
wetlands protector, was given the heave-ho by LSU, a group calling
itself "America's Wetland" gave the university a fat check for
$300,000.
After a little digging, I found that it wasn't really "America's
Wetland," the group with the oh-so-green name and love-Mother-Nature
website, that provided the money. One-hundred percent of the loot, in
fact, came from Chevron Oil Corporation. Chevron had merely
"green-washed" the money through "Wetlands."
Was this Big Oil's "thank you" to LSU for canning van Heerden? The
University refuses to talk to me about van Heerden's firing ("It's a
confidential personnel matter").
Bosworth notes such a grant to the University "doesn't come without
strings attached." And this "Wetland" grant appears to have some
tangled threads. LSU will monitor the coast's environment, guided by a
committee of what the school's PR office describes as "experts" in
coastal infrastructure and hurricane research. But the school is
pointedly excluding its own expert, van Heerden. Instead of van
Heerden, LSU announced it will rely on representatives from Chevron —
and Shell Oil.
You can't challenge Shell's expertise on coastal erosion. The Gulf
Restoration Network has calculated that the oil giant, "has dredged 8.8
million cubic yards material while laying pipelines since 1983 causing
the loss of 22,624 acres."
Shell too is a sponsor of "America's Wetland."
Bad Behavior
Van Heerden and his team of hurricane experts at LSU have other
enemies, notably Big Oil's little sisters: The Army Corp of Engineers
and its contractors. One internal University memo that has come to
light is a complaint from the Army Corp of Engineers' Washington office
to an LSU official demanding to know why van Heerden's "irresponsible
behavior is tolerated."
By van Heerden's bad "behavior," they seem to be referring to the
professor's computer model of the Gulf which predicted, years before
Katrina hit, that the levees built by the Army Corp were too short. The
Army Corp, van Heerden asserts, compounded the danger to New Orleans by
going shovel-crazy, with massive dredging and channel-cutting sought by
shipping interests.
Following the complaint from Washington, the University took away van
Heerden's computer (no kidding). But they couldn't take away his voice.
He began to speak out. University officials do not deny they told him
to shut up, to stop speaking to the press about his concerns. They were
worried, they told van Heerden, that his statements jeopardized their
government funding.
Van Heerden's revelations were, indeed, damning. He revealed that the
Bush White House knew, the night Katrina came ashore, that the levees
were breaking up, but withheld this crucial information from the
state's emergency response center. As a result, the state slowed
evacuation and stranded residents were left to drown. [See Big Easy to Big Empty.]
A class action lawsuit has been filed against the Army Corp of
Engineers on behalf of all the people of the city who lost homes and
loved ones because the Corp-designed levees had failed. Anyone with a
TV and two eyes could see that. But the Bush Administration flat out
denied it knew its system was flawed and refused any responsibility for
the disaster.
Van Heerden, who had warned Washington, long before the flood, that the
levees were 18 inches too short, would have been a devastating expert
witness for the public. But the university ordered him not to testify,
a relief for the Corps. (A verdict is expected soon in the non-jury
case.)
The Army Corp and its contractors can feel safer now that van Heerden
has been booted. His Hurricane Center will be downsized and instead,
the University will expand its "Wetland" program, with Chevron's
checkbook.
Joining Chevron and Shell on the LSU board of "wetland" experts will be
the Shaw Group, a huge Army Corp contractor.
If you've read John Perkins' book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man,
you would know about Shaw Group, or at least the subsidiary for whom
Perkins did his dirty work: an engineering outfit that used flim-flam,
intimidation and fraud to turn a buck. (I once directed a government
racketeering investigation of one of their projects before Shaw bought
them up. In the 1988 case, a jury found the company was co-conspirator
in a multi-billion-dollar fraud, charges the company settled with a
civil payment.)
Shaw Group is also a sponsor of "America's Wetland." So is electricity
giant Entergy Corporation. That's the company that shut off the power
in New Orleans during the flood, then sold the loose juice elsewhere,
pocketing a multi-million-dollar windfall.
Yes, America's Wetland does have a green cover, Environmental Defense,
exposed in the Guardian UK in 1999 for its icky habit of licking the
sugar off corporate candy canes. We caught them trying to set up a
lucrative financial operation with the very polluters they were
supposed to be challenging. [See Fill your lungs it's only borrowed grime]
I spoke with the Chairman of American Wetland, King Milling. Milling's
just a local good ol' boy, a sincere guy, not a front for Big Oil. But
he naively let his group be used to buy the debate over the environment
and ice out un-bought experts like van Heerden.
Flood Warning
With LSU deep in the pocket of the corporate powers and under Army Corp
pressure, van Heerden didn't stand a chance. For doing nothing more
than trying to save a few thousand lives, he has paid quite a price. As
he told me this week from his home, "No good turn goes unpunished."
That's van Heerden's fate. But what about the city's? Is New Orleans
ready for another Katrina?
His answer is not comforting: "No, definitely not. If anything, it's
worse than when Katrina hit. We've lost a lot of wetlands protection.
It's not very safe ... A section of the flood wall itself has sunk
about 9 inches, a result of [Hurricane] Gustav."
Is anyone listening?
"The [Army] Corp won't talk to me," says van Heerden. "Like everybody
else, they are crossing their fingers and hoping we don't have a
storm."
Well, don't say we didn't warn you.
***********
Greg Palast's film for Democracy Now! "Big Easy to
Big Empty: The Untold Story of the Drowning of New Orleans" is
available as a no-cost
download this week. Or make a donation to the investigative reporting
fund and receive a gift of the DVD of the film, with Amy Goodman,
signed by the reporter. For more information, go to www.GregPalast.com.
Subscribe to Palast's podcast
and follow Palast on Twitter.
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