And you thought Santa was back at the crib resting up for next year.
Katrina victims swamp corps with trillions in claims
By Brad Heath, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — Tens of thousands of people whose property was destroyed when Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed New Orleans’ protective levees have filed claims demanding the government pay astronomical sums that would be enough money to make multimillionaires of everyone in Louisiana.
The Army Corps of Engineers received 247 claims from residents, businesses and government agencies seeking $1 billion or more, according to the agency. That’s the tip of a very large iceberg: The corps, which designed and built the city’s storm protections, faces more than 489,000 claims for the damage and deaths in the post-Katrina flooding.
The claims are so massive the government could never hope to pay them. Rather, they are the hopeful — and at times inflated — requests of people reeling from losses.
Just the top filings add up to so much money that the entire annual output of the nation’s economy — $12 trillion — couldn’t pay them off, according to the corps’ listing. It is the first public accounting of the scale of damage demands the corps faces.
“That’s totally off-the-wall,” says Ashton O’Dwyer, a New Orleans lawyer handling some of the claims. He says everyone making a claim ultimately must provide evidence to back it up, “and we won’t know the real total until that happens.”
By comparison, the Louisiana Recovery Authority estimates that Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005 together caused about $100 billion in physical damage statewide. The federal government already dedicated more than $130 billion on recovery from the hurricanes.
Most of the claims allege that the corps is to blame for the levee failures that inundated huge sections of New Orleans. A claim form is the first step in seeking compensation.
One claim alone seeks $3 quadrillion in damages, almost all of it for personal injury. That’s a 3 followed by 15 zeros — about 250 times the nation’s gross domestic product. A resident of a section of New Orleans that includes the hard-hit Lower 9th Ward filed another claim for $6 trillion, double the annual federal budget. (more…)
Now of course much of this (like the two incidents above) are just plain ridiculous. But the truth is that there are those who have not received the full payout entitled to them by insurance companies (if they were covered). For example, my neighbor is from New Orleans and his parents were one of those that had to relocate to another state because their home was destroyed. According to him, his parents did not even receive half of their insurance payout due to various stipulations. His story is just one of many I have heard like this. At the same time, I’m not crazy–some of our cuzzins’ are trying to get broke off–PERIOD!
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