Day: November 2, 2009

wise as an owl, smart as a fox – Sarah Vance, Federal District Judge Eastern District Louisiana

The most difficult decisions that a Court can make require it to balance the need for finality and procedural regularity against the possibility, however faint, of injustice.  Any effort to draw a proper line between the two will never be perfect, nor will it be satisfactory to all involved. Nevertheless, the Court’s duty is to ensure that one side of the balance does not swallow the other.

Order and Reasons, Imperial Trading v Travelers, Federal District Judge Sarah Vance EDLA

When I ran into Imperial Trading v Travelers while checking for the latest on MRGO (nothing new there), it felt a bit like running into an old friend  – one you left stranded at a parte.  It wasn’t that I didn’t intend to follow up after posting good-ol-boys gone wild but Judge Vance in no mood for a parte.I just didn’t. With so much to cover in Katrina litigation here on the Coast, it just slipped my mind.  So, with a better late than never, here’s the end of the story about the good-ol-boys parte. Continue reading “wise as an owl, smart as a fox – Sarah Vance, Federal District Judge Eastern District Louisiana”

The MRGO Monster Mash

He did the mash
He did the monster mash

Levees.orgBumper2AOn or about August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast largely sparing Greater New Orleans, which fortunately lay in Katrina’s rapidly deteriorating western eye-wall. The result was that Katrina laid waste to virtually everything in its path along the Mississippi Gulf Coast; but in Orleans and St. Bernard Parishes, Katrina’s winds did not even register as a Category 3 on the Saffir-Simpson scale. The winds barely reached 100 miles per hour. Nevertheless, through the fault and negligence of Defendants, a tidal surge rushed from the Gulf though the MR-GO and collided at the nexus of the Gulf Intra-coastal Waterway [“GIWW”] and MR-GO with another storm surge from Lake Borgne which combined to flood the New Orleans east bank (downtown protected area), the Lower Ninth Ward and St. Bernard Parish by overwhelming levees/floodwalls and/or spoil banks that had been negligently designed, constructed, maintained, undermined, weakened and/or operated by the Defendants.

This action results from one of the most predictable and preventable man-made catastrophes in American history—the tragic devastation of homes and lives during and after Hurricane Katrina [“Katrina”] on or about August 29, 2005–caused by negligence, fault and/or strict liability of the United States Army Corps of Engineers [“Corps”], Washington Group  International, Inc. [“Washington” or “Washington Group”], the Board of Commissioners of the Orleans Parish Levee District [“Orleans“], St. Paul Fire and Marine Insurance Company [“St. Paul”], and The Board of Commissioners of the Lake Borgne Basin Levee District [“Lake Borgne”] [collectively “Defendants”]

He did the mash
Joseph M. Bruno did the monster mash

Bruno is the MRGO Plaintiffs’ Liasion Counsel; the monster is the Motion to Dismiss filed by the USA; and the first steps in the monster mash were Continue reading “The MRGO Monster Mash”