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.
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.
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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.
Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards, Rep Patrick Connick and Sandy Rosenthal shown in 2017. Photo/Ralph Madison
Every anniversary of the worst civil engineering disaster in US history is worth full observance.
We are surprised that we missed this story about Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco published a year ago.
But we are glad the story by the Associated Press was brought to our attention.
In the story, which marked the passing of Governor Blanco, we are drawn to this statement by current Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards:
“She [Kathllen Blanco] led Louisiana through one of our darkest hours, when hurricanes and the failure of the federal levee system devastated much of our state,” Edwards said in a statement Sunday.
Levees.org founder Sandy Rosenthal will be a featured author this coming autumn at the 2020 Louisiana Book Festival.
