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Vol. 73/No. 47      December 7, 2009

 
Judge: Army engineers to
blame for Katrina flood
 
BY JACQUIE HENDERSON  
HOUSTON—More than four years after the levees broke in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, a federal judge has ruled in favor of residents who hold the government, not nature, responsible. More than 1,400 people died and thousands more were left homeless in this disaster.

U.S. District Judge Stanwood Duval handed down the decision November 18 that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers displayed “gross negligence” in failing to maintain a navigation channel, resulting in levee breaches and flooding of the city.

For more than 40 years, he said, the corps had known that a crucial levee protecting suburban St. Bernard Parish and the Lower 9th Ward neighborhood would be compromised by the deterioration of the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet channel.

The judge awarded a total of $719,000 to four individuals and one business that sued the government in April 2006. He rejected the cases of two plaintiffs from eastern New Orleans.

“The government has caused a lot of homelessness and death here. I welcome the judge’s decision because it has been as if you can’t sue them, that you can’t hold the government responsible,” Sam Jackson, a New Orleans public housing resident who has been fighting the escalating destruction of public housing since Katrina, told the Militant.

Another New Orleans resident, Mike Howells, added, “The flooding caused by government neglect went far beyond St. Bernard Parish and the Lower 9th. Hundreds of thousands of others have been denied the right of return and have even been kicked out of their homes.”

Katrina flood damage claims numbering 400,000 have been filed. A Circuit Court dismissed class action lawsuits filed in 2007 against insurance companies for flood damage.

The channel was completed in the 1960s as a highly profitable shipping shortcut between New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico. Protective marsh totaling 27,000 acres that stood between St. Bernard Parish and Lake Borgne were wiped out in the process. Long before Katrina hit, there had been many warnings that the destruction of wetlands could create a funnel effect that would intensify storm surges, Duval said in his ruling.

The channel represents only one example of the indifference shown by governments at all levels to the lives of working people. In the five years leading up to Katrina, Louisiana received nearly $2 billion for Army Corps of Engineers civil works projects, more than any other state.

By 1998 Louisiana’s state government dedicated less than one-tenth of 1 percent, or $1.98 million, of its construction budget to New Orleans levee improvement. By contrast, $22 million was spent that year to renovate a home for the Louisiana Supreme Court and other such projects.

Local government officials boasted about having the most ambitious flood-fighting plan, which included evacuation procedures for people with special needs. None of this proved to be true.

“Yes, the government is to blame. And it’s still going on today. They are tearing up the levees they have been working on and starting again because the rotten job they are doing has been found out,” Eloise Williams, from the Algiers section of New Orleans, told the Militant.

“The department is currently reviewing Judge Duval’s decision,” Justice Department spokesman Charles Miller told the New Orleans Times-Picayune. “We have made no decision as to what the government’s next step will be.”  
 
 
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