Dr. Ivor van Heerden

Ivor van Heerden, former deputy director of the now shuttered LSU Hurricane Center, announced in February 2010 that he was suing LSU for wrongful termination. The outspoken professor claimed LSU retaliated against him for making statements critical of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers after the agency’s levee system failed in New Orleans during Katrina.

Late yesterday, federal Judge James Brady handed the outspoken professor a victory.  In an 18-page ruling, Brady determined that Dr. van Heerden’s claim has merit, the claim that LSU retaliated against him when he exercised his whistleblower rights.

“I am quite happy,” said Dr. van Heerden in a phone interview with Levees.org.  “Now we will have our day in court.”

Van Heerden added that this will be the opportunity for both the jury and the public at large to know what really happened.

The ruling spelled out that some very questionable behavior by LSU was “undisputed.”

After the storm hit, van Heerden began making public statements suggesting that the Corps failed to properly engineer and maintain New Orleans levees and was to blame for the city’s flooding. (Id.).  Unfortunately for van Heerden, the LSU administration and many of its faculty did not approve of his statements for fear that they might cause the University to lose federal funding.

The ruling contained other similarly damning statements.

In May 2006, van Heerden published “The Storm,” in which he again hypothesized at length about the Corps’ role in the levee failures and exposed LSU’s attempt to silence his opinion. (Id.). LSU responded by further urging van Heerden not to make public statements and stripping him of his limited teaching duties. (Id.).

“This ruling is important because it means there will be no more depositions, no more summary judgements and no more discoveries,” said Dr. van Heerden in closing.  “The next step is trial.”

The ruling can be viewed here.