Last November 5-8, about 50 University of Notre Dame civil engineering undergrads, led by a few Notre Dame civil engineering faculty, took a field trip to New Orleans, ostensibly to view flood control works. Their behavior during this trip was unbelievably offensive to the victims of Katrina. In addition, the propriety of the trip itself is questionable, since it appears to be nothing more than a recruiting junket by the New Orleans District of the Corps of Engineers, using professors at Notre Dame who also have deep connections to the Corps to fly in students/potential future Corps employees.
Updated: Notre Dame, in a written response to me, admitted the trip was actually for recruiting purposes. See comment "Notre Dame responds" below
Read on...
I found out about this because I stumbled across a website on the Notre Dame server about the field trip. The site includes about 800 pictures taken during the trip.
Below you'll find an email I sent to the president's office at Notre Dame yesterday regarding some shameful behavior by a number of Notre Dame students on a field trip in New Orleans post-Katrina. I found photos of the behavior on Notre Dame's own server.
To allow you jump to the meat of the story, here's the most egregious photos:
http://www.flickr.com/...
and here's the website about the field trip that is still up on the ND website:
http://www.nd.edu/...
These pictures have made me sick to my stomach, and they've provoked the same reaction in everyone I else I've shown them to. They're the equivalent of tapdancing on someone's grave.
Plus there's the fact that the Corps seemingly used Katrina as a recruiting tool, a craven move if I've ever seen one. And they even blew off the local government that day to do it. There is no depth to which these folks will not sink.
Enjoy.
--->email to Notre Dame follows--->
Dear [ ]:
Last November 6, the New Orleans City Council Public Works Committee had their regular monthly hearing. They had been trying for two weeks to get representatives of the Corps New Orleans District in front of them to talk drainage, but they got blown off by Jim St. Germain, the top project manager in charge of drainage pump repairs and construction.
I actually blogged about this at the time:
http://fixthepumps.blogspot.com/...
As you can see, New Orleans Councilwoman Stacy Head complained to Sewerage & Water Board (S&WB) Executive Director Marcia St. Martin at the hearing. By way of explanation, the S&WB is the local agency in charge of water, sewerage and drainage in New Orleans. Their facilities were severely damaged by Katrina, and the Corps took over repairs to the S&WB drainage pump stations that help keep New Orleans dry. Those repairs are still undone to this day.
I now know where Mr. St. Germain was that morning. He was giving a tour of the 17th Street floodgates to a bunch of college students from Notre Dame University! But St. Germain skipping a meeting of New Orleans' elected representatives meant to discuss pressing drainage matters is only the tip of this story.
This weekend I stumbled on something amazingly galling. Last November 5-8, three civil engineering professors (Joannes J. Westerink, Peter C. Burns, and Jeffrey W. Talley) brought almost fifty of their undergrad students to New Orleans to ostensibly tour flood control works. The tour was co-sponsored by the Corps of Engineers New Orleans District. Why such a trip couldn't happen in Indiana, Illinois, or Michigan isn't clear. The main webpage for the field trip is still up on the Notre Dame server:
http://www.nd.edu/...
Here's some more information about the trip:
- 2 of the 3 professors have very deep ties to the Corps. One (Talley) worked for the Corps for 20 years. The other - the guy that led the trip named Joannes J. Westerink - actually co-wrote the computer program the Corps and many other agencies and firms use for storm surge modeling. It's a program called ACDIRC, and Westerink was a leader in its use on the Corps-sponsored IPET investigation after Katrina, including the recently released Risk & Reliability maps. The guy is seriously plugged in at ERDC (the Corps' research institute in Vicksburg, MS). He even got an award from the Army this past April for his work on storm surge modeling after Katrina, which Notre Dame duly noted: http://newsinfo.nd.edu/....
What's also really interesting about Westerink is that he is also a member of the West Bank superlevee board, officially known as the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority - West (SLFPA-W). This is a brand new agency entrusted with provision for flood protection in a broad area on the West Bank of the Mississippi across from Orleans Parish. Its members are chosen for their professionalism and expertise (rather than political connections) and are appointed by the Governor of Louisiana. The creation of the agency (along with its sister agency on the east bank of the river) was hailed as a major step forward in preventing the kind of cronyism and incompetence that was the hallmark of local levee boards for decades.
- The itinerary for the tour was pretty bizarre, considering what most college students some to see in New Orleans post-Katrina. There was almost no exposure to the actual damaged parts of the city. The itinerary is linked here:
http://www.nd.edu/...
Here's the places they visited:
Day 1:
Steamboat Natchez evening dinner cruise along Mississippi followed by hotel accommodations provided by the Omni Royal Orleans, a very expensive hotel in the heart of the French Quarter. Early November is tourist high season in New Orleans, and rooms here had to be very pricy.
There is already mugging for the cameras during a cruise which, according to the field trip webpage, was intended to, in part, "study river levees." Instead, they got fed dinner and danced to the onboard jazz band.
Day 2:
a) Visit Corps New Orleans District HQ on Leake Avenue for briefing about what happened in Katrina and how the Corps is "fixing" it. The slides are linked off the field trip webpage, and they indicate that the presentations were created just for the Notre Dame students.
b) Drive to Drainage Pumping Station #6 on the 17th Street canal, which is run by the S&WB. This station was overwhelmed by storm surge in Katrina, but it was also the station that drained a large swath of New Orleans after the storm. It is a massive building, and at one time was reputed to be the largest pumping station in the world. The students get a backstage tour led by S&WB pump station operator.
c) Drive to new 17th Street canal floodgates (built and run by the Corps) for backstage tour by Jim St. Germain and Chris Gilmore of the Corps New Orleans District. Also includes on site visit of 17th Street breach area. The first pictures of students goofing off and mugging for the camera start here.
d) Drive to the new London Avenue canal floodgates (built and run by the Corps) for another inside-the-fenceline tour. More mugging for the camera here.
e) Drive to repaired area at London Avenue south breach (near Warrington and Mirabeau), which was repaired by the Corps. After walking across folks' property (including a destroyed house) to act like children in front of and on top of the new wall, they finally get out to visit some of the devastation. They walk two blocks in the Gentilly neighborhood, looking at the bombed out houses. This neighborhood got about ten to twelve feet of water. Of course, idiot tourist-types that they are, they amble all over people's yards and gawk through the front doors and windows like the houses are museum pieces.
It is the pictures from this portion of the trip that disturb me the most. A number of students and even Dr. Talley decided to climb on the wall and actually stand on it, laughing and gesturing to the cameras the whole time. At the very least, this is very dangerous - if someone had fallen they would have been seriously hurt. At the most, it's illegal and would have probably earned them a citation from the local levee district police for trespassing.
The amount of laughter and carrying-on in the photos here is shocking, and really unfathomable for someone who has been through what I and the thousands of my neighbors have been through. It is like spitting on graves.
f) The itinerary says they were to visit the Lower Ninth Ward, but that part of the trip was dropped.
g) Travel to Vicksburg. Stay in Hampton Inn.
Day 3
a) Visit Corps lab at ERDC in Vicksburg. This is basically where Dr. Westerink does a lot of work, so this was not a difficuly place to gain entry. They view the supercomputer running ACDIRC and the 17th Street canal physical model. They get to see one of the centrifuges that was used in the levee break investigation. They're also shown a lot of other stuff that shows how smart and great the Corps is. It is a total backstage, all-access pass that normal members of the public could never get.
Let me make clear that the students and faculty went places most citizens in New Orleans could never, ever get permission to go, even though they must rely on these floodworks for preservation of their lives and property. The only way they could have gotten such access was by Dr. Westerink trading on his deep connections with the Corps of Engineers.
b) Visit the Old River structure at the junction of the Mississippi and Atchafalaya Rivers. This is the structure that keeps the water flowing down the Mississippi rather than the Atchafalaya. It is run by the Corps and - as with most of the rest of the agenda - is not generally open to the public. There are more goofing around pictures here.
c) Visit a nearby hydroelectric plant in Vidalia. Other than the hotels and restaurants and PS#6 (and I doubt the difference between the Corps and the S&WB was emphasized), this appears to be the only non-Corps facility visited.
d) Travel back to Omni Royal Orleans
Day 4
a) Riverboat John James Audubon takes students through Industrial Canal lock (I'm sure there was lots of propaganda being fed to them about the lock expansion the Corps has wanted there for 20 years) and up Industrial Canal (that's the canal whose walls blew out and destroyed the Lower Nine) to Intracoastal Waterway out to Chef Pass. Many students appear to skip this.
Again there is mugging for the camera on this trip. Dr. Westerink actually takes shots of students laughing it up right in front of the Lower Ninth Ward. Other students dance and gesture to other boats on the waterways. Some sleep. There seems to be very little interest in the actuality of what they witness as they cruise through the heart of the devastation.
Let me tell you that I visited the Lower Nine many times after the storm. It was horrifying every time. I can't imagine cruising by it on the Industrial Canal and not being awed by what can be glimpsed over the new wall. The idea that anyone would pose for photos in front of it with their thumbs up turns my stomach. The idea that a professor would take such a picture leaves me speechless.
b) Travel home.
For a post-Katrina colege student trip, it's very strange. There was no volunteering, no tours of the Ninth Ward, no visit to St. Bernard, and almost no interaction with locals. It was as if the students were kept in a bubble.
It seems obvious what this trip really was when you see one particular link on the main field trip page. It's the one marked "Intern/Employment Opportunities," and it links to job applications for the Corps New Orleans District and for ERDC in Vicksburg. When I saw that, that's when the light bulb went on.
Almost 50 impressionable, clueless college students were flown over 1000 miles to New Orleans to only look at Corps of Engineers structures and offices, were put up at a fancy hotel and ate at nice restaurants (they had dinner at Jacques-Imo's the second night), and we're supposed to believe this is relevant to their course in computational hydrodynamics?
No - this was a recruiting trip by the Corps New Orleans District using one of their buddies at ERDC to bait his students in. I cannot believe the chutzpah it would take to do this. It is using Katrina and its victims as a cheap marketing gimmick to drum up new employees. I suppose they had to go all the way to Indiana because no local engineer in New Orleans would ever apply for a job with the Corps again.
One has to wonder whether this is ethical behavior for both the Notre Dame professors involved, as well as the Corps of Engineers employees. And who exactly paid for this four day getaway?
But what is the most disgusting is the behavior of the students. All (and I mean all) of the digital pictures taken on the trip are also on the field trip website. There are about 800 taken by four different folks, including two of the professors (Westerink and Burns). I was struck by how much smiling, goofing around, and mugging for the camera took place among the students and the faculty. For these folks, it seems like Katrina was just one big joke to them.
I've pulled out over two dozen photos showing this and I've uploaded them to a Flickr album. You can see them here:
http://www.flickr.com/...
The pictures of Corps project manager Jim St. Germain giving the tour (instead of attending the City Council meeting) are in there too.
Looking at these photos made me gag. It almost feels like seeing the Abu Gharib pictures for the first time (response to commenters: I'm talking about how I feel here. Sorry for getting personal and going "over the top," but since when is being very upset and attempting to put words to that so horrible?). These students and their faculty chaperones clearly saw this trip as quite the lark. Even during the brief time they actually spent walking in a destroyed neighborhood, there was joking and laughing. It's incredibly callous.
Please respond to this as soon as you can. I sincerely hope that you do not endorse such behavior by your students and (especially) your faculty.