Katrina Victims: Justice is Coming

I just returned from three days in New Orleans chairing a meeting of our dedicated trial team in Robinson v. United States. This is my 25^th trip to New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina. Every time I visit this flood-devastated region, I am vividly reminded of why I wake up every morning thinking about how we can secure justice for Katrina victims in the face of a withering defense mounted by the Bush Administration’s so-called Justice Department.

I make it a practice every visit to spend time in one of the neighborhoods devastated by the failure of the federal government’s leaky levees and the deadly, surge-enhancing MR-GO ship channel.

This time I toured the Gentilly area where water rose as high as ten feet during Katrina. While there are pockets of reconstruction, this middle-class section is still mostly uninhabited with miles of boarded up or gutted homes and a sprinkling of trailers in the front yards. The scene resembles what I see in many other largely abandoned neighborhoods throughout New Orleans.

The overall impression is that the city and neighboring St. Bernard Parish remain largely like they were when I first visited in January 2006—a few months after the worst man-made disaster in American history. It is an eerie, bleak scene with empty, weed-infested lots intermingled with ghost-like shells of former homes. A funereal pall hangs over these once vibrant communities.

That is undoubtedly why Katrina-ravaged New Orleans is one of the locations for shooting the new film The Road based on Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel about a father and son struggling to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. http://www.ropeofsilicon.com/article/several_new_looks_at_the_road

The prospects for rebuilding many of these homes are not bright.

My cab driver was raised in Gentilly, and he got teary-eyed when we stopped to look at his totally destroyed elementary school.

“I have such fond memories of my youth here,” Craig told me in a hushed voice. “It is really painful to come back and realize that other children will not have my good fortune of being educated and growing up here.”

Not far away stands what’s left of his mother’s home. It had a pre-Katrina value of $300,000. She has not been able to rebuild because she had no flood insurance, and she received only $40,000 from the federally-funded Road Home assistance program.

Between the paltry federal aid, bank repossessions and the city seizing property for unpaid taxes, the task of trying to rebuild in New Orleans is a Herculean challenge.

That is why our lawsuit seeks to hold the federal government accountable for its grossly negligent conduct in causing the worst engineering disaster ever. If we win for our six test plaintiffs, the foundation will be laid for economic justice for the more than 400,000 victims who have filed claims. To win this epic legal battle, however, it will take every bit of legal ingenuity and dedication, in addition to millions of dollars for experts and tens of millions of uncompensated legal services by our 20 law firms championing the cause of Katrina Justice.

In the land of the free, justice is very expensive.