78°
Baton Rouge, Louisiana
7 Day Forecast
Latest Weather Blog
With Katrina anniversary approaching, new series looks at LSU researcher's predictions
Trending News
BATON ROUGE - The National Geographic Channel this weekend unveiled the start of a five-part series that takes a long look at predictions made by an LSU engineering professor before Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans.
Next month marks 20 years since the storm hit. A year before the storm, professor Ivor van Heerden had told PBS' "Nova" television program that a terrible storm could soon strike the region. The new television series, which is also streaming on Hulu and Disney+, covers what came of van Heerden's predictions.
"As Hurricane Katrina was approaching, we knew this was going to be a catastrophe," he says in the show "Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time."
Katrina formed in August 2005 and for a time was a Category 5 storm with 175 mph winds. By the time it made landfall Aug. 29, 2005, winds were down to 125 mph but its waters were poised to pour over barriers designed decades earlier.
"This documentary very vividly shows, you know, the plight of the people, and i mean it's it's it's very, very, very moving," van Heerden said in an interview with WBRZ.
The series has five episodes, three released Sunday. Two more are set to debut Monday. Part of the series explores what might have been had Katrina formed in a different era.
"If you, for example, took Hurricane Katrina and ran it in a computer model in 1900 compared to when it happened in 2005 - so in 1900 there would have been more wetlands, the ocean would have been cooler, and the storms are a little smaller because there was less heat energy, you know," van Heerden said. "New Orleans would have had - you would have had wet ankles."
LSU didn't renew van Heerden's contract after he criticized the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers following the storm, and the professor settled a lawsuit for $435,000 after other researchers reached similar conclusions, an activist group reported in 2013.
"We've been warning about this since 1992," van Heerden told WBRZ. "If you ignore the science, you ignore it at your folly."
More News
Radar
7 Days
