14 DAY TRIAL // It would appear that negligence on the part of experts in the US Army Corps of Engineers led to the flooding of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. The ruling belongs to a US judge, who came to the conclusion after analyzing pieces of evidence for and against, presented by six residents and a business on the one hand, and the engineers, on the other. The court's decision was to uphold the complaints that the civilians and the company made against the Corps, saying that the engineers' lack of ability in maintaining a navigation channel indeed led to the massive flood that wiped homes and businesses off the face of the Earth, the BBC News reports.
The ruling also states the the plaintiffs are to receive some $720,000 in damages, in a ruling that could see thousands of others suing for the recovery of their losses. An estimated 80 percent of New Orleans was engulfed by waters following one of the most devastating tropical storms in recent history. The mayhem caused billions of dollars in damages, and also claimed the lives of more than 1,800 people. An additional 705 were declared missing, following what some called the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States. Overall, Katrina was the sixth strongest tropical storm ever recorded.
“Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was the largest natural disaster in the history of the United States. Preliminary damage estimates were well in excess of $100 billion, eclipsing many times the damage wrought by Hurricane Andrew in 1992,” Randall Bell, an economist and crisis consultant, wrote a while back. If the current ruling holds future appeals, then the US Army Corps of Engineers could lose a lot of the reputation it now enjoys in the eyes of the public on account of its usually skilled work.
The judge ruled that New Orleans' Lower 9th Ward and nearby St. Bernard Parish were flooded due to engineers' “negligent failure” to maintain the shipping channel Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet. He was clear to specify that the Corps was not responsible for floods that occurred in the eastern parts of the city. US district judge Stanwood Duval wrote a 156-page ruling detailing his decision. Lawyers for the US government argued that the strength of the storm was simply too great to pinpoint the source of breaches in the levees to a single channel.