The Storm

The ultimate inside story of the Katrina tragedy—from the cofounder of the LSU Hurricane Center

After warning for years about the looming threat of catastrophic flooding in New Orleans, Ivor van Heerden was one of the highest-profile media experts during the Katrina disaster. Over the following eighteen months, he was even more prominent as he challenged the official version of those events and campaigned for an engineering plan that would protect all of southeastern Louisiana, once and for all. In The Storm, van Heerden lays out in full detail the stunning incompetence among the bureaucrats, the politicians, and the Army Corps of Engineers that culminated in the catastrophe that crippled, perhaps forever, a great American city.