Residents of several neighborhoods in the New Orleans area that were hardest hit by flooding after Hurricane Katrina can sue the Army Corps of Engineers over their claims that a government-built navigation channel was largely to blame, a federal judge ruled yesterday.
Successful lawsuits against the corps could result in billions of dollars in damage payments.
Since the flood, those who lived in the devastated neighborhoods near the east side of New Orleans — including the Lower Ninth Ward, New Orleans East and St. Bernard Parish — have contended that the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet caused much of their damage by intensifying the surge from the storm. The damage, they say, was foreseeable.
10,000 N.O. homes withering away
City cleanup order being enforced slowly
Sunday, February 04, 2007
By Michelle Krupa
Sandwiched between a shotgun single choked to the rafters by knotty weeds and a vacant two-story double bearing a rusty flood line 5 feet high, Joe Cross has become a lonely sentinel in his once-buzzing neighborhood.
All along this stretch of Almonaster Boulevard, between Claiborne Avenue and the Norfolk Southern railroad line, doors flap on twisted hinges and broken windows reveal moldering furniture, a grotesque testament to desertion 17 months after Hurricane Katrina's floodwaters ravaged more than 100,000 homes and businesses in New Orleans.
Cross, a maintenance man at a school in Gert Town, gutted the shotgun double he shares with his wife and three children within four months of the storm. His mother moved into one side last winter. The rest of the family followed in August, keeping the house in line with a city law that forbids property owners from letting structures wallow in post-Katrina funk....
... But up and down Almonaster and across the city's flood plain, muck-ridden houses still litter the landscape.
A block-by-block survey of flooded areas completed last month shows that about 10,000 properties in New Orleans remain in a state of withering neglect, according to records provided by City Hall. This means they are in violation of a so-called gutting law that gave owners until Aug. 29, the first anniversary of the storm, to clean out their houses or at least get on a list to have someone do it for them.
NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (AP) -- The Army Corps of Engineers is proposing to divert up to $1.3 billion for levee repairs from the Mississippi River's East Bank, which was ravaged by Hurricane Katrina, to the West Bank, where tens of thousands of people have resettled.
The West Bank was one of the only parts of the New Orleans metropolitan area spared the flooding that followed the 2005 hurricane. But the levees protecting it -- and the roughly 250,000 people who live there -- are inadequate, the corps concedes.
If approved, the plan has the potential to slow new levee work on the East Bank, where most of New Orleans is situated, and pit the city's residents against those on the West Bank.
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- bill 2-04-2007 4:12 pm
10,000 N.O. homes withering away
City cleanup order being enforced slowly
Sunday, February 04, 2007
By Michelle Krupa
Sandwiched between a shotgun single choked to the rafters by knotty weeds and a vacant two-story double bearing a rusty flood line 5 feet high, Joe Cross has become a lonely sentinel in his once-buzzing neighborhood.
All along this stretch of Almonaster Boulevard, between Claiborne Avenue and the Norfolk Southern railroad line, doors flap on twisted hinges and broken windows reveal moldering furniture, a grotesque testament to desertion 17 months after Hurricane Katrina's floodwaters ravaged more than 100,000 homes and businesses in New Orleans.
Cross, a maintenance man at a school in Gert Town, gutted the shotgun double he shares with his wife and three children within four months of the storm. His mother moved into one side last winter. The rest of the family followed in August, keeping the house in line with a city law that forbids property owners from letting structures wallow in post-Katrina funk....
... But up and down Almonaster and across the city's flood plain, muck-ridden houses still litter the landscape.
A block-by-block survey of flooded areas completed last month shows that about 10,000 properties in New Orleans remain in a state of withering neglect, according to records provided by City Hall. This means they are in violation of a so-called gutting law that gave owners until Aug. 29, the first anniversary of the storm, to clean out their houses or at least get on a list to have someone do it for them.
- jimlouis 2-04-2007 11:14 pm [add a comment]
NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (AP) -- The Army Corps of Engineers is proposing to divert up to $1.3 billion for levee repairs from the Mississippi River's East Bank, which was ravaged by Hurricane Katrina, to the West Bank, where tens of thousands of people have resettled.
The West Bank was one of the only parts of the New Orleans metropolitan area spared the flooding that followed the 2005 hurricane. But the levees protecting it -- and the roughly 250,000 people who live there -- are inadequate, the corps concedes.
If approved, the plan has the potential to slow new levee work on the East Bank, where most of New Orleans is situated, and pit the city's residents against those on the West Bank.
- jimlouis 2-04-2007 11:30 pm [add a comment]
We spend more than that in a fucking week in Iraq. The West Bank and Nola have enough issues without the asshats in the Corps playing them against each other.
- mark 2-05-2007 1:19 am [add a comment]