Posted on 09/20/2005 11:38:42 PM PDT by CobaltBlue
Louisiana's top hurricane experts have rejected the official explanations for the floodwall collapses that inundated much of New Orleans, concluding that Hurricane Katrina's storm surges were much smaller than authorities have suggested and that the city's flood- protection system should have kept most of the city dry.
With the help of computer models and visual evidence, scientists at Louisiana State University's Hurricane Center have concluded that Katrina's surges did not come close to overtopping those barriers.
* * * * Ivor van Heerden, the Hurricane Center's deputy director, said the real scandal of Katrina is the "catastrophic structural failure" of barriers that should have handled the hurricane with relative ease.
"We are absolutely convinced that those floodwalls were never overtopped," said van Heerden. * * * * Tuesday, researchers showed numerous indications that Katrina's surge was not as tall as the lakefront's protections. They showed a "debris line" that indicates the top height of Katrina's waves was at least four feet below the crest of Lake Pontchartrain's levees. They also pointed out how the breached floodwalls near the lake showed no signs of overtopping -- no splattering of mud, no drip lines and no erosion at their bases. They contended that the pattern of destruction behind the breaches was consistent with a localized "pressure burst," rather than widespread overtopping.
Their model indicates that most of the surge around the lake and its nearby canals was less than 11 feet above sea level, and that none of it should have been greater than 13 feet. The Army Corps's flood-protection system for New Orleans was designed to handle surges of more than 14 feet above sea level.
"This should not have been a big deal for these floodwalls," said oceanographer G. Paul Kemp. There's no way this should have exceeded the capacity."
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Earth. Where the hell are you? Certainly not here; maybe you are in the DU universe.
The first ambulance chaser to file a lawsuit over Katrina...
DICKIE SCRUGGS
(Attorney-at-law / Trent Lott brother-in-law)
From Pascagoula, Mississippi, Dickie Scruggs is the southern lawyer who got the current feeding frenzy started (by suing Mississippi), and he now represents 29 states in ongoing tobacco litigation. Being the brother-in-law of Trent Lott, Senate Majority Leader, and college roommate of Mississippi Attorney General Mike Moore didn't hurt his chances any.
Under Scruggs and Moore, the movement became a national pattern. And why not, there were billions of dollars at stake. (Our dollars.) About the same time, Lott introduced Scruggs to his consultant, Dick Morris, who helped with jury selection. When Morris became Bill Clinton's advisor after the 1994 elections, he urged Clinton to take on 'kids' smoking' as a 'cause.' Clinton was reluctant at first, but a 'poll' paid for by Scruggs changed his mind.
Among other lawyers who will share in the spoils of the tobacco wars is Hugh Rodham, brother of Mrs. Clinton.
The exact amount Scruggs will receive from the settlement with the states isn't known, but it could run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. He graciously consented to let a judge decide the amount he would get from the Mississippi case. (The rate one attorney collected from the settlement with the states was $130,000 per hour!) Dickie recently bought a $192,000 Bentley and already owns a Lear jet and a mansion on the beach.
What will he go after next? Better keep close watch on your wallet .
******
Profile: Richard 'Dickie' Scruggs
Ground Zero for the class-action litigation filed against more than 400 not-for-profit hospitals and health systems isn't an urban warehouse staffed 24/7 by teams of lawyers and investigators. It's an elegantly appointed second-floor law office of plaintiff attorney Richard Scruggs overlooking the Lafayette County Courthouse square in Oxford, a northern Mississippi college town of 12,000 and home to the late author William Faulkner and the University of Mississippi.
Scruggs, 58, is a nattily attired and courtly country lawyer whose wave of lawsuits have struck the tax-exempt hospital industry like a tsunami, with more hospital defendants added almost weekly.
Lawyers who have faced Scruggs or worked with him advise hospitals to take his legal actions seriously. They say his name is still cursed in the boardrooms of asbestos and tobacco companies for the multibillion-dollar settlements he and his legal team have extracted from them.
Scruggs and his team of 10 other law firms filed the 52 hospital lawsuits in federal courts on behalf of uninsured patients alleging that not-for-profits routinely overcharge self-pay patients, hound them with aggressive collection policies and fail to provide adequate charity care even as they hoard millions of dollars in cash reserves and property in violation of their tax-exempt status. The American Hospital Association is named a co-conspirator and defendant in a number of the lawsuits.
Since June when the Scruggs-led legal team began filing the lawsuits, hospitals have scrambled to reassess their charity-care, collection and governance policies. And Scruggs has already claimed one victory in the litigation against hospitals, inking an agreement in August with North Mississippi Health Services, Tupelo, the largest rural health system in the country, which had not even been sued when the agreement was announced.
In defense of access
Scruggs disagrees that the case is only about the economic harm and humiliation suffered by poor and uninsured patients socked with harassing bills that have driven some to bankruptcy. He says it's also about how hospitals' policies are affecting access.
He says the harm the hospitals have created with their charity-care policies is more insidious in some ways than what the tobacco and asbestos industries have wreaked with their products. "These hospital policies discourage patients who need medical care from seeking treatment at the price of aggressive collection practices," he says. "They've erected a bar to hospital beds. Patients will delay and delay treatment until they can no longer wait and the problem becomes most acute and far more expensive."
While Scruggs agrees that hospitals collect less than 5% of the money owed them by poor and uninsured patients, he contends hospitals have a reason for expending all that effort to collect from poor people unable to repay debts that are usually written off: "These policies are designed to discourage the utilization of healthcare services," he says.
He says former hospital chief executive officers and chief financial officers he's interviewed say many hospitals develop their own in-house collection firms because outside collection agencies usually decline to tackle such accounts with little likelihood of repayment. "You can't squeeze blood out of a turnip, but you can keep the turnip from coming back," he says. "This is a form of patient-dumping. They don't want these patients to come back."
He paraphrases a frequently used axiom used by not-for-profit hospital executives: "No margin, no mercy."
A Mississippi icon
So who is this new Darth Vader of the tax-exempt hospital industry, directing the attacks on community and faith-based hospitals? Scruggs is a self-made Mississippi legend. In one of the nation's poorest states he has amassed a fortune of several hundred million dollars by suing big corporations that have harmed or killed people through their products. Scruggs led the effort to end the tobacco industry's 50-year legal winning streak in 1998 by recovering a historic, $205 billion settlement with 46 states.
Richard 'Dickie' Scruggs
Age: 58
Birthplace: Brookhaven, Miss.
Family status: Married for 33 years to Diane, the younger sister of the wife of U.S. Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.). They are the parents of two adult children: Zachary, a partner in his firm, and Claire.
******
Scruggs, Dickie
Fortune
September 29, 1997
Imagine that you are the head of a large corporation. Your general counsel walks into your office. He is sweating.
"We're being sued," he says.
By whom?
"Seven thousand people."
This is what it is like to be targeted by Dickie Scruggs. It is an unnerving experience, and it is one that over 100 asbestos manufacturers endured throughout the 1980s.
Scruggs, 51, a plaintiffs lawyer operating out of the sleepy Gulf Coast town of Pascagoula, Miss., has built an enormously lucrative practice by amassing impossibly huge numbers of plaintiffs and then suing the hides off corporations on their behalf. Scruggs says his strategy is a simple one: "I like to get the stakes so high that neither side can afford to lose."
Now imagine the same conversation as before, but your general counsel is trem- bling, in addition to sweating. How many people are suing you?
"Two hundred million."
This is what it has felt like to be a tobacco company
Business related issues? Aw, heck...you trump me. I only fought for custody of my children when they were being abused by my spouse. My attorney worked like a demon, and charged me very little. We won, and my daughters never were abused again.
But your insight is FAR more valuable than mine. < /sarcasm>
From the 4 hurricanes last year, there are dozens(that can be found on the public record) of lawsuits pending in Florida against homebuilders who skimped on post-Hurricane Andrew building codes with the consequences of damaged houses.
now these here academics are doing everything in their power to finesse the largest amount of money possible from any and all parties that can be found culpable for the Katrina damage to their state. It is also a fact that if this hindsight study holds up, these academic types will have a fully booked "expert witness" and speaking engagement schedule for the coming years.
That being said, if the study holds up, every owner of a building built after the levees and floodwalls were certified by the ACoE are in the same position as the Florida homeowners who had to sue homebuilders for skimping on building codes.
You're entire line of argument is flying in the face of the realities of the last century.
That being said, I still believe that gravity and water are natural, and not man made.
It is incorrect reasoning to assume that the failure mode would be over-topping. The barriers can fail in a lot of different ways. It is hardly surprising that they failed in some other manner before they were over-topped.
In any case, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, as they say. The barriers were designed to protect against a certain intesity of storm. They achieved that. They were not designed to protect against a stronger storm. Not surprisingly, they failed to do so.
It is analagous to the fact that every now and then you find somebody alive in a car that has been crushed by a truck. That means the vehicle, through chance, particularly good construction, or whatever, managed to protect the occupant beyond any reasonable expectation for the design. That does not mean the car failed or the builder was negligent every time somebody does not survive a car being crushed by a truck.
Oy, vey. No, dear, it's not.
For one thing, in Louisiana, they don't have contributory negligence, they have comparative negligence.
Which means, even if you're only partially at fault, you still have to pay.
Further, in Louisiana, the law isn't caveat emptor, because it's not a common law state. There is strict liability for these type of cases. Maybe even absolute liability, I'd have to do more research.
But no matter what, contributory negligence wouldn't be a bar to recovery for an improperly constructed floodwall, even in a common law state, because the people who were flooded out weren't negligent. Imprudent, maybe, but not negligent.
God decided to take the devil to court and settle their differences once and for all. When Satan heard this, he laughed and said, "And where do you think you're going to find a lawyer?"
You'll have to pardon me if I don't take your word on the law anywhere, much less Louisiana; so far I've seen that you didn't even know it wouldn't be a jury trial.
Not enough "big" and too much "easy".
I haven't mentioned private contractors; I'm specifically addressed the "deep pockets" of "Uncle Sugar."
The flaw in your reasoning is that the storm had already passed when the floodwalls failed.
It wasn't the storm that caused the floodwalls to fail, it was high water.
But, at any rate, this entire line of reasoning is premature.
I just thought it was an interesting argument with potentially some recovery for people who might not otherwise have any other way of recouping their losses.
Time will tell.
Heh...Heh...Heh...
The good strikes a better! : )
That's funny coming from you sue-happy posters.
Gravity and water are made by God.
Houses and levees are made by men.
God is perfect.
Man is not. Some men, in fact, will cheat you out of your hard-earned money.
If you want to wait for God to give you your reward in Heaven, that's your call. If you want justice here on earth, the courts are open to you.
You might win, and you might lose, but at least you tried.
For a fee....
I actually don't know the best way to frame this case. Could go several different ways.
Maybe a better lawyer would know right off the bat, without spending a few hours in the law library.
That's not me. I have to do the research.
Well, the high water didn't get there from a garden hose.
If I am given a task to protect against a certain event, I am not negligent if my work fails to protect against a more severe event.
At some point, a decision was made that it was cost effetive to protect NO from a certain intensity of storm, but beyond that it was not feasible and the best course was evacuation. You can fault that political decision, I guess, but there is no profit in that. The storm protection did exactly what it was supposed to do, and no more. That is what we paid for. That is what we got.
Spoken like a true scumbag. Got news for you, genius: "Uncle Sugar" only has "a deep pocket" to the extent that he's picking mine for tax dollars.
I swear, it becomes more and more apparent the older I get that Shakespeare was on to something...
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