One of the darkest moments in this nations history was the Hurricane Katrina Debacle. What we are waiting for, is the subpoena with the names of George Bush, Condi Rice, Dick Cheney and The Brown Guy;  for the Katrina Mess.

no doubt you remember the situation..

in case you’ve forgotten, let us refresh your memory

Beginning today we examine the various court cases which have begun as a result of the mishandling of the incident, by the government; insurance companies; and various individuals.

and to think Bush was eating cake.. and Condi was Shoe Shoppin.

it all made for one very bad pot of gumbo,

Hurricane Katrina Suit Tests Government Liability

Suit Claims ‘Mr. GO’ Made Katrina Damage Even Worse

By JIM AVILA, BETH TRIBOLET and REYNOLDS HOLDING

April 20, 2009—

The victims of Hurricane Katrina, their lives uprooted and homesteads washed away, will finally get their day in court today as a landmark trial opens in New Orleans to consider whether the government made a deadly storm even worse.

The Untold Story of Hurricane Katrina

The accused culprit in this legal dispute is nicknamed Mr. GO, the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet that the federal government cut through 76 miles of swamps and cypress forests to make shipping easier between the Crescent City and the Gulf of Mexico.

The people who filed the lawsuit — six survivors of the area’s hurricanes — claim Mr. GO magnified Katrina’s power by destroying wetland buffers and funneling wind-whipped water into the city.

“It has been a catastrophe ever since it was built,” said John Andry, the lawyer for the plaintiffs in the case.

But the government argues that it cannot be sued over Mr. GO, claiming protection under a 1920s federal law and the principle of sovereign immunity. Besides, there was nothing seriously wrong with Mr. GO — and little that could have lessened Katrina’s destructive power, say the government’s lawyers.

“The catastrophe would have occurred regardless of the MRGO and regardless of the way the channel was maintained prior to the flood,” the lawyers wrote in their legal brief.

The stakes are unprecedented: If the plaintiffs win, tens of thousands of other Katrina victims will likely win their lawsuits as well, making the federal government liable for up to $100 billion in damages, according to Army Corps of Engineers estimates. That would be more than any court judgment in U.S. history, according to legal experts.

That the case has made it this far is itself extraordinary. Over the almost four years since Katrina hit, dozens of lawsuits seeking damages for broken levees and other failed hurricane defenses have foundered on the government’ defense of immunity.

The federal Flood Control Act shields the government from liability for defective flood-control projects. And another law says the government can’t be sued for acting with reasonable care or making a judgment call.

But the victims in this case say none of that matters. They argue that Mr. GO is a navigation canal, not a flood-control project.

Video of the 17th street canal floodwall collapsing. taken by New Orleans firefighters during Katrina. Read all about it here: http://wizbangblog.com/

They also say the Army Corps of Engineers wasn’t acting with due care when it botched operation and maintenance of Mr. GO, and it wasn’t making a judgment call when it ignored a requirement to tell Congress about the channel’s environmental problems.

The Corps “had the arrogance and power to ignore anybody they wanted to ignore,” said professor Oliver Houck of Tulane University Law School in New Orleans. “They were the Corps. Until Katrina, they were king.”

The victims’ arguments have been persuasive enough to survive a government motion to dismiss the case on immunity grounds, a motion that has succeeded in virtually every other Katrina lawsuit.

Now they will have to back their arguments with hard evidence if the judge in this case — Stanwood R. Duvall of the U.S. District Court in New Orleans — is to find the government liable. Then, it would take another stage to determine how much the feds owe the victims, people like Kent Lattimore, one of the lawsuit’s six plaintiffs.

Lattimore’s home was destroyed by Katrina, and only a grass-covered slab remains.

“To this day, four years later, I think, how do you fix this, fix these neighborhoods?” he said, while gesturing toward an area that used to be his yard. “It’s devastating.”

But it is the small losses — a ring he received from playing in a college football bowl game, for example — that seem to bother Lattimore almost as much as the destruction of his home and the ruin of his business.

“I miss the small things: pictures, letters,” he said. “Four years later, I’ve processed a lot of that, I’m dealing with that, and maybe it’s what I’m supposed to have in my life.”

He and his neighbors, though, are hoping for much more, a hope nurtured by the slow but remarkably steady progress of the lawsuit that is finally coming to trial.

The trial is expected to last four weeks, and if it ends in favor of Lattimore and the other plaintiffs, the U.S. government will either be forced to settle — or face a crushing bill.

“If they win,” Houck said, “Katie bar the door, because the number of claimants out there for similarly situated money are in the tens of thousands.”

This is from the Times Picyune of New Orleans -

Trial begins today in suit against Corps over flooding during Katrina

by Susan Finch, The Times-Picayune

Monday April 20, 2009, 8:05 AM

Starting in federal court today, a group of New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish residents will square off against the Army Corps of Engineers in a trial they hope will prove that failure to properly build and maintain the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet eroded protective wetlands and led to massive flooding that destroyed their homes and businesses during Hurricane Katrina.

The corps will try to convince Judge Stanwood Duval that even with the best possible maintenance of the MR-GO, only better and higher hurricane protection levees could have held back the storm surge.

The trial, expected to last three to four weeks, will be conducted by Duval without a jury.

The trial is getting under way as work continues to close the MR-GO, which opened in 1963 as a shortcut for large ships between the Gulf of Mexico and the Industrial Canal in New Orleans.

Almost two years later, Hurricane Betsy hit in September 1965, flooding parts of the city, including Gentilly and the Lower 9th Ward, as well as Arabi and Chalmette.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs, among them WDSU-TV news anchor and eastern New Orleans resident Norman Robinson and his wife, have said that if Duval rules for their clients and the decision is upheld on appeal, thousands of additional Katrina flood victims in eastern New Orleans, the Lower 9th Ward and St. Bernard could seek compensation from the federal government.

Moreover, the plaintiffs’ attorney have vowed that if they win the case, they will ask President Barack Obama and Congress to help resolve the claims of all Katrina flooding victims.

The Robinson case and a pending MR-GO class action are the only surviving federal lawsuits against the corps on behalf of Katrina flood victims.

Last year, Duval dismissed a class action against the corps over failure of drainage canal levees during the 2005 storm. He cited a 1928 federal law that makes the corps immune from liability for damage caused by its flood-protection projects.

But Duval decided the Robinson case could proceed because it involves a navigation project, for which the corps has no immunity under law.

Besides the Robinsons, other plaintiffs in the trial starting Monday are former Tulane football player Kent Lattimore, who lost his St. Bernard trailer home and his real estate appraisal business to the floodwaters; nurse Tanya Smith, whose custom-built Chalmette residence, shared with two young sons, was ravaged by Katrina; and Lucille and Anthony Franz Jr., whose home and source of retirement income, a five-apartment complex, were lost to the flooding.

. . . . . . .

Susan Finch can be reached at sfinch@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3340.

The hurricane left many parts of the city underwater

A lawsuit filed by New Orleans residents against government engineers for damages caused by Hurricane Katrina is to be heard in court in Louisiana.

The residents claim that the US Army Corp of Engineers is liable to pay damages, because of poor maintenance of a shipping channel near the city.

If successful, some 120,000 other residents and firms could seek payouts.

More than 1,800 people died and much of the city was flooded by the devastating 2005 hurricane.

You may have seen this Video taken by the Guerra Family after Hurricane Katrina. Chalmette, LA.

this area is what was called the East, or East New Orleans. as you notice they are in their house as the storm starts. as the tape ends, look at how long they’ve been there. as well as the fact that they are alone in a sea of houses. this is actual footage so if you haven’t seen it – please watch this family and their fight for survival in the storm. even their dog has to fight to survive. it’s really heartwrenching. Now to think the government wants to shortchange someone after going through this ? no way.. These are Tax Payers; Land Owning Americans and They Deserve the Full Protection of the Law; if George Bush gets it.

‘Preventable’

The plaintiffs argue that because of the Corp of Engineers’ poor upkeep of the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet (MRGO), a shipping channel that links the Gulf of Mexico and New Orleans, flooding in the city’s St Bernard Parish and Lower Ninth Ward was exacerbated.

“They are responsible,” said Lower Ninth Ward resident Lucille Franz, 75, who lost her home in the flood, and whose sister died at a local nursing home.

“We wouldn’t have had that kind of water if it hadn’t been for the MRGO.”

The residents’ lawyer described the disaster as “the largest preventable catastrophe in American history”.

They are asking for damages of between $300,000 (£206,000) and $400,000 for each individual.

Government lawyers acting on behalf of the Corp of Engineers have not commented on the case, but court documents suggest they will argue that the flooding was caused by Katrina’s storm surge, and not by a failure of the MRGO’s flood defences.

This is from the District Chronicle from DC’s Howard University,

Remember Kanye Wests’ Comments - which are mirrored in this report

Study reveals nation’s ‘dirty little secret’ – post Katrina

By: Special to the NNPA from the Louisiana Weekly

Posted: 4/19/09

NEW ORLEANS (NNPA) – Contrary to a popular notion reported in news coverage of Hurricane Katrina, the 2005 Gulf Coast disaster did not reveal to most Americans that widespread poverty and inequality are the nation’s ”dirty little secret.”

Rather, most Americans were aware of these problems before they were highlighted by the devastation of Katrina, according to a new study by Stanford sociologists. As a result, the event did not become a watershed in the debate over poverty, as some pundits have claimed.

In fact, awareness of poverty and inequality actually decreased among some groups of Americans after Katrina, suggesting that some people may have reacted negatively to news coverage by what they claimed to be a ”liberally biased media,” according to the study, ”Did Katrina Recalibrate Attitudes Toward Poverty and Inequality? A Test of the ‘Dirty Little Secret’ Hypothesis.”

The paper, co-authored by sociology Professor David Grusky and doctoral student Emily Ryo, will be published in the spring edition of the Du Bois Review. Lawrence Bobo, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Centennial Professor, co-edits the two-year-old, peer-reviewed journal on race in the social sciences. The forthcoming issue, which also includes a paper by education Professor Emeritus John Baugh, will be wholly devoted to new research related to Katrina.

By way of polls, researchers gauged attitudes changed following the disaster. According to a Pew Research Center poll, 70 percent of the U.S. adult population claims to have paid ”very close attention” to news about Hurricane Katrina, making it the fifth-most closely watched story in the last 20 years.

”It follows that Katrina had the potential to recalibrate public ideologies in ways far more profound than, say, the release of yet another government report on inequality and poverty,” Grusky and Ryo write in the study.

According to the researchers, journalists broached many themes in their coverage of the disaster, but a common one was that Hurricane Katrina cast a fresh light on the depth and extent of poverty in America.

Ryo, a fourth-year graduate student, said that after Katrina she, too, had accepted the premise that Americans had been ”completely unaware” of the size of these problems. ”It’s easy to buy into the story that if only we had known about the extent of poverty in America, we would have buckled down and taken care of it,” she said in an interview. The sociologists classified participants in the Maxwell survey according to:

1. Their level of knowledge about poverty and inequality;

2. Whether they thought that inequality and poverty were social problems;

3. Whether they thought something should be done about these problems and, particularly, whether government action should be taken.

From these categories, four groups emerged with coherent ideologies, which the sociologists described as ”activists” (strong supporters of state intervention to reduce poverty), ”realists” (skeptical of the state’s ability and responsibility to reduce poverty and inequality), ”moralists” (do not characterize poverty and inequality as important problems) and ”deniers” (allege that poverty and inequality are neither growing nor substantial problems).

But what was most striking was that the two uninformed groups from 2004, which made up 11 percent of respondents, virtually disappeared after Hurricane Katrina, Grusky said in an interview.

”We do see a growing awareness of poverty and inequality in the disappearance of the [uninformed] classes, groups that were unaware of these problems before Katrina and were susceptible to its lessons,” he said. ”They are the groups for which it was a ‘dirty little secret.”’

According to Grusky and Ryo, ”the coverage of Katrina is fascinating precisely because it converted a conventional story about a natural disaster into an unconventional and high-profile story about the socially constructed disasters of poverty, inequality and racism.”

As a result, the question emerges about why there is such an underdeveloped response to these issues since it is clear that most Americans know about them.

The authors conclude that for most people, the problems are only ‘’side commitments” and, as a result, politicians are not forced to address them. ”There has to be a deeply felt ‘master commitment’ to create a strong incentive for politicians to translate public sentiment into policy,” Grusky said.

In 2004, Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards touched upon the growing divide between the ”haves” and ”have-nots” with his ”two Americas” platform. Although Edwards eventually lost, Grusky and Ryo said he selected a theme that resonated with many Americans.

Just as environmental concerns have been brought into the mainstream by framing them within issues such as ”global warming,” so, too, could poverty and inequality be developed into mainstream ideologies by emphasizing that costs are collectively borne by society, Grusky and Ryo assert.

The authors conclude, ”The coverage of Katrina, for all its shortcomings, may be understood as consistent with this renewed appreciation of how poverty, inequality and racism color almost everything, even how a natural disaster plays out.”

Do You Remember When the Cops were caught looting from Walmart ?

well it wouldn’t be BadGals without a lil music now would it ?
we’re gonna wrap it all up with this lil ditty, George Bush Is a Gold Digga.. Uh Uh cause he aint messin wit no broke..Uh Huh Uh Huh with of course the original informas “Kanye West and Jamie Fox“. Uh Huh Uh Huh.. it’s okay to turn your speakers up, because this is a booty shaker

The Black Lantern and The Legendary KO lay down the real story of Hurricane Katrina. No, the Saints weren’t coming then.

Tell Us, What’s your opinion on the Whole Katrina Debacle ? Do You Think That the Government should live up to the Bush Promises, to “Fix New Orleans” ?

Did you like this? If so, please bookmark it, about it, and subscribe to this blog RSS feed.