Ivor van Heerden

I think he does a good job on the science and for that the book is to be commended. I write as a meteorologist and hydrologist but I learned some things about storm surge modeling and a LOT about the levees. He does an excellent job in laying out the terrain, canals and failed levee system that funneled water into the city. The Army Corps of Engineers (ACE) comes off beneath poorly in Van Heerden's analysis. Really the book probably deserves 4 stars but the reason i dropped another off was his incessant political bashing along with self-promotion. Very early you will learn how absolutely prescient the author was and how evil and incompetent the ACE and all Republicans are. Perhaps that is completely true, though somehow I doubt it. Clearly the response to Katrina was not very competent and the pre-storm engineering utterly inadequate. I sort of doubt FEMA under any administration would suddenly become a model of efficiency and the ACE is hardly a creature of either political party. Hopefully we won't have to find out how FEMA does in another huge event, oh wait we just did with Sandy. It did do better, some. But Sandy also hit the richest part of the U.S., not one of the poorest and nothing failed in Sandy comparable to the New Orleans levees. Anyway, this book was written so soon after the event that many of the proposals for what to do in terms of mitigating the next storm were still in the planning or even pre-planning stages. It would be interesting to see where it all stands today. Two other somewhat negative points: NO photos and the maps for the most part look hand-drawn (with no scale, a cardinal cartographic error) which is sort of neat at times but not very clear in other places. Still, a very good book covering a complex event.… (mais)