This week, founder Sandy Rosenthal was featured by NTD-TV News in New York City to comment on the Michigan dam failures which affected over 11,000 people.
Rosenthal’s interview by Don Tran of NDT-TV was a followup to her commentary on May 25, 2020 in which she questioned the logic of having the dam owner––Boyce Hydro––lead and manage the investigation into what went wrong.
For more about the Michigan dam failures, and Rosenthal’s commentary about it, click here.
Levees.org founder Sandy Rosenthal will be a featured author this coming autumn at the 2020 Louisiana Book Festival.
The annual festival is a celebration of readers, writers, and books, to be held on Saturday, Oct. 31, 2020, at the State Capitol, State Library, Capitol Park Museum, and the Capitol Park Welcome Center in Baton Rouge.
The festival, free and open to all, is presented by the Louisiana Center for the Book in the State Library of Louisiana, an agency of the Louisiana Department of Culture, Recreation & Tourism.
To learn about the festival, click here.
Levees.org founder Sandy Rosenthal has released the third of four excerpts from her upcoming book, Words Whispered in Water: Why the Levees Broke in Hurricane Katrina (Mango Publishing, August 2020).
The excerpt is called Go Ahead, Sue Me. It comes from Chapter 7; Figuring out the Allies.
———-
Saturday, November 10, 2007, dawned sunny and cold, but windless. I put on my tennis clothes and headed to a tennis match with Debbie Cobb. Even during busy weeks, I refused to give up my precious exercise. After I returned, showered, and ate some lunch, I got back to my desktop computer and the ever-present incoming emails.
I noticed an email with the subject heading, “Cease and Desist Letter,” which was sent from an attorney representing the ASCE. The headmaster of Newman School was also copied. I opened the attachment and discovered that the ASCE didn’t like the Levee Spin 101 video very much and were ordering me to take it down from YouTube. After a lengthy description of the history of the ASCE, the letter ended with this: “… should you ignore this letter and continue to disseminate this defamatory material, please be advised that ASCE intends to take appropriate legal action to protect its interests.”[i]
This was a technical way of saying, “If you don’t stop, we will sue you.”
My initial reaction to this letter was that we must be on the right track! I thought it was quite remarkable that an in-house counsel attorney felt fine about harassing a fledgling grassroots group and a bunch of high-school kids. This was likely the first time in ASCE’s history that the society had to deal with negative press of this magnitude.
