NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana - The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' failure to maintain a navigation channel led to massive flooding in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, a federal judge ruled late [Wednesday].
The decision could make the federal government the target of billions of dollars worth of legal claims by more than 100,000 other individuals, businesses and government entities that also sustained damages from the water that inundated 80 percent of the city when the levees protecting the low-lying city were breached in several places.
U.S. District Judge Stanwood Duval on Wednesday approved a $20 million settlement involving federal class-action lawsuits that claimed sloppy work by the Orleans, Lake Borgne Basin and East Jefferson levee districts contributed to levee breaches during Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
The settlement money actually would come from insurance proceeds resulting from policies the levee districts held on the levees, said Joseph Bruno, an attorney representing plaintiffs in the case.
But a decision on how the money would be distributed is a long way off, Bruno said.
August 29 marked the fourth
anniversary of the day Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and the Gulf
Coast. The devastation wrought by both the hurricane itself and the
government's inept response prompted remarkably critical corporate
media coverage that promised to fight for Katrina survivors and change
the way we talk about poverty and race (FAIR Media Advisory, 9/9/05).
Confronted with images of corpses floating in the blackened floodwaters or baking in the sun on abandoned highways, there aren't too many people left who see what happened following Hurricane Katrina as a purely "natural" disaster.
The first major hurricane of the Atlantic season, Hurricane Bill, developed into a dangerous Category 4 storm and served as a stark reminder that many of our coastal areas remain deeply vulnerable to severe damage from hurricanes.
There's another floater. Four years on, there's another victim face down in the waters of Hurricane Katrina, Dr. Ivor van Heerden.
I don't get to use the word "heroic" very often. Van Heerden is heroic. The Deputy Director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center, it was van Heerden who told me, on camera, something so horrible, so frightening, that, if it weren't for his international stature, it would have been hard to believe:
A coalition of advocacy groups this morning called on the federal
government to double its efforts to restore the wetlands, marshes and
barrier islands that help protect the Gulf Coast from hurricanes.
Television news reports are casting new light on the violence that flourished in New Orleans in the anarchic days after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
The reports -- broadcast Thursday by WTAE TV in Pittsburgh [1] and WDSU in New Orleans [2] -- focus on two unsolved crimes: the near-fatal shooting of Donnell Herrington, who was allegedly attacked by a group of white vigilantes in the Algiers Point
NEW ORLEANS - Earnest Hammond, a retired truck driver, did not get any of the money that went to aid property owners after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
He failed to qualify for one federal program and was told he missed the deadline on another. But he did get a trailer to live in while he carries out his own recovery plan: collecting cans in a pushcart to pay for the renovations to his storm-damaged apartment, storing them by the roomful in the gutted building he owns.
NEW ORLEANS - A groundbreaking civil suit began in federal court here Monday to consider claims by property owners that the Army Corps of Engineers amplified the destructive effects of Hurricane Katrina by building a poorly designed navigation channel adjacent to the city.
