Ugly Doesn't Change....

From Bob Marshall in the Times-Picayune:

Ugly doesn't change, even when you see it coming. Neither does stupid.

I'm talking about the decision by LSU to fire Ivor van Heerden, the head of the LSU Hurricane Center who earned world-wide renown for his work before and after Hurricane Katrina. This move had been rumored and threatened almost since van Heerden began his post-storm work, but it was no less repulsive for its inevitability.

As someone who covered that story, I always thought the state should be rewarding van Heerden, not chasing him away, because metro area residents -- indeed, citizens of any U.S. community currently relying on federal levees to keep them safe -- owe Van Heerden a huge debt.

Bob, that makes, at least two of us, but I expect there are many more who feel the same way.

Please read the entire editorial. It's difficult to pick and choose more quotes. Marshall lays out, step by step, the debt the people of New Orleans and south Louisiana owe to Ivor. Don't forget that the original story from the press was that Katrina flooded New Orleans. It was only when Ivor and his team began investigating that the truth began to emerge.

What they found was something else: Signs of catastrophic engineering failures.

In other words, the floodwalls and levees failed not because they were too small, but because they had been either poorly designed, poorly built -- or both.

But for Ivor and Team Louisiana, would we even know this?