ONE GEOSCIENTIST'S ATTEMPTS AT PUBLIC COMMUNICATION DURING AND AFTER KATRINA

At LSU we had developed a very good scientific and engineering understanding of flooding New Orleans. This had been disseminated to numerours federal and state agencies. The media also knew. Initial media communications were ‘normal', we supplied data and insights as to the nature of the expected Katrina surge and potential impacts. Thirty two hours before landfall, we showed New Orleans would flood. However, we received very few calls from governmental agencies. The Louisiana State Police, Center for Disease Control (CDC) and the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)contacted us pre-landfall. The police to know when roads would ‘go under'; the CDC surge data and GIS data base; and HHS wanted the GIS data base.

All surge outputs were disseminated to the State Emergency Operations Center (EOC). The day before landfall (Sunday), we had a conference call with CDC to discuss public health impacts. We expected a more agencies to call. Concerned that officials did not appreciate what could go wrong, we started to put out some ‘doom's day' type forecasts to the media. We also realized that the levees could fail. This was communicated to governement officials.

Twenty four hours after Katrina struck, “the wheels were coming off” and at every opportunity we pushed the science of what would go wrong. By Wednesday we were becoming desperate as were the media. Realizing that state agencies were battling, we took the initiative and moved equipment and personal into the state EOC to start the mapping work needed for rescues as well as utilizing and expanding our GIS database. We realized within a few days that the levees could not have failed because they were overtopped. We made our views known which lead to amongst other issues, censure from university officials.

It is obvious that science and engineering had been ignored and exacerbated the Katrina tragedy. Policy makers rather the scientists and engineers had set the levee construction and design agenda, as well as the coastal wetland restoration efforts. Both programs had failed to ‘supply the goods.'

Two weeks into the catastrophe, I decided to write a book to point out what had gone wrong and why. “The Storm” was recently published and I hope that the public will now realize that much good science is being overlooked because of political agendas. If our research does not get utilized for the public good, then perhaps we have failed.