Ivor van Heerden was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. He is cofounder and deputy director of the LSU Hurricane Center and director of the Center for the Study of Public Health Impacts of Hurricanes. He is also associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at LSU. He holds a Ph.D. in marine sciences from LSU, where his research focused on the Atchafalaya River Delta; his ongoing research areas include disaster preparation and response, coastal geomorphology, environmental management, and habitat restoration.

Mike Bryan has written or collaborated on many books, including Cal Ripken's bestselling autobiographyThe Only Way I Know, Uneasy Rider, and The Afterword, a novel.

The ultimate inside story of the Katrina tragedy-from the cofounder of the LSU Hurricane Center
After warning for years about the looming threat of catastrophic flooding in New Orleans, Ivor van Heerden was one of the highest-profile media experts during the Katrina disaster. Over the following eighteen months, he was even more prominent as he challenged the official version of those events and campaigned for an engineering plan that would protect all of southeastern Louisiana, once and for all. In The Storm, van Heerden lays out in full detail the stunning incompetence among the bureaucrats, the politicians, and the Army Corps of Engineers that culminated in the catastrophe that crippled, perhaps forever, a great American city.