In 2005 post Hurricane Katrina, the City of New Orleans and landfill operators dumped enormous mounds of hurricane debris onto private property that sits under the footprint of the Gentilly Landfill. To this day, Plaintiffs still own the land that the garbage companies destroyed to make millions of dollars for themselves. Plaintiffs demand just compensation for the damage and that the illegal profits be returned to the rightful owners.

The Supreme Court returned the case to Judge Michael Bagneris at Civil District Court in New Orleans for trial preparation. Waltzer Wiygul & Garside attorneys will now prepare the case for trial.

By Matt Smith, CNN

updated 1:37 PM EDT, Sat April 27, 2013

Yscloskey, Louisiana (CNN) — On his dock along the banks of Bayou Yscloskey, Darren Stander makes the pelicans dance.

More than a dozen of the birds have landed or hopped onto the dock, where Stander takes in crabs and oysters from the fishermen who work the bayou and Lake Borgne at its mouth. The pelicans rock back and forth, beaks rising and falling, as he waves a bait fish over their heads.

At least he’s got some company. There’s not much else going on at his dock these days. There used to be two or three people working with him; now he’s alone. The catch that’s coming in is light, particularly for crabs.

“Guys running five or six hundred traps are coming in with two to three boxes, if that,” said Stander, 26.

Out on the water, the chains clatter along the railing of George Barisich’s boat as he and his deckhand haul dredges full of oysters onto the deck. As they sort them, they’re looking for signs of “spat”: the young oysters that latch onto reefs and grow into marketable shellfish.

There’s the occasional spat here; there are also a few dead oysters, which make a hollow sound when tapped with the blunt end of a hatchet.

About two-thirds of U.S. oysters come from the Gulf Coast, the source of about 40% of America’s seafood catch. But in the three years since the drilling rig Deepwater Horizon blew up and sank about 80 miles south of here, fishermen say many of the oyster reefs are still barren, and some other commercial species are harder to find.

“My fellow fishermen who fish crab and who fish fish, they’re feeling the same thing,” Barisich said. “You get a spike in production every now and then, but overall, it’s off. Everybody’s down. Everywhere there was dispersed oil and heavily oiled, the production is down.”

The April 20, 2010, explosion sent 11 men to a watery grave off Louisiana and uncorked an undersea gusher nearly a mile beneath the surface that took three months to cap.

Most of the estimated 200 million gallons of oil that poured into the Gulf of Mexico is believed to have evaporated or been broken down by hydrocarbon-munching microbes, according to government estimates.

The rest washed ashore across 1,100 miles of coastline, from the Louisiana barrier islands west of the Mississippi River to the white sands of the Florida Panhandle. A still-unknown portion settled on the floor of the Gulf and the inlets along its coast.

Tar balls are still turning up on the beaches, and a 2012 hurricane blew seemingly fresh oil ashore in Louisiana.

Well owner BP, which is responsible for the cleanup, says it’s still monitoring 165 miles of shore. The company points to record tourism revenues across the region and strong post-spill seafood catches as evidence the Gulf is rebounding from the spill.

But in the fishing communities of southeastern Louisiana, people say that greasy tide is still eating away at their livelihoods.

“Things’s changing, and we don’t know what’s happening yet,” said oysterman Byron Encalade.

Life before the spill

Before the spill, Encalade and his neighbors in the overwhelmingly African-American community of Pointe a la Hache — about 25 miles south of Yscloskey — earned their living from the state-managed oyster grounds off the East Bank of the Mississippi.

Back then, a boat could head out at dawn and be back at the docks by noon with dozens of 105-pound sacks of oysters.

Now? “Nothing,” says Encalade, president of the Louisiana Oystermen Association.

Louisiana conservation officials have dumped fresh limestone, ground-up shell and crushed concrete on many of the reefs in a bid to foster new growth.

It takes three to five years for a viable reef to develop, so that means Pointe a la Hache could be looking at 2018 — eight years after the spill — before its lifeblood starts pumping again.

“This economy is totally gone in my community,” said Encalade, 59. “There is no economy. The two construction jobs that are going on — the prison and the school — if it weren’t for those, the grocery store would be closing.”

When the catch comes in, everyone wants you to know that it’s safe to eat. Repeated testing has shown that the traces of hydrocarbons that do come up in the shrimp, crab and oysters are far below safety limits for human consumption.

“The monitoring of the seafood supply has been exemplary,” said Steve Murawski, a fisheries biologist at the University of South Florida. “There’s no incidence of people getting sick and no report of any tainted fish reaching the market.”

While much of the Gulf’s seafood industry has rebounded, the hardest-hit communities like Pointe a la Hache, Yscloskey and the inlets in Barataria Bay, west of the Mississippi, have not recovered.

Scientists are still trying to understand what the oil has done to the marshlands of southeastern Louisiana.

Sure, the catch is safe — but that doesn’t mean much when seafood prices are down and fuel costs are up.

“Since the spill, my shrimp production is off between 40 and 60% for the two years that I did work full time,” said Barisich, who has both a shrimp boat and an oyster boat tied up at Yscloskey. “But my price is off another 50%, and my fuel is high: 60 cents a gallon higher than it’s ever been.”

Figures from Louisiana’s Department of Wildlife and Fisheries tell a similar story.

The statewide oyster catch since 2010 is down 27% from the average haul between 2002 and 2009, according to catch statistics from the agency. In the Pontchartrain Basin, where Encalade and Barisich both work, the post-spill average fell to about a third of the pre-spill catch.

Barisich says oysters are barely worth the effort anymore.

“On the state ground — on a perfect weather day, keep that in mind — it’s 20 sacks a day,” he said. “Twenty sacks a day at $30 a sack is $600. $300 worth of fuel. $100 worth of other expenses and I pay the deckhand, I got $150 a day on a perfect day. It don’t pay to go out.”

And no boats going out means no fuel being sold at Frank Campo Jr.’s marina, down the bayou from Barisich’s dock.

“If you don’t burn it, I can’t sell it to you,” Campo says. “They’re not doing very well with the crabs, and there’s not a lot of oyster boats going out.”

Demand for the oysters is off, too.

“You used to never ask the dealer if he wanted oysters,” said Campo, whose grandfather started the marina. “You just showed up with them. Now, he’ll call you and tell you if he needs ‘em.”

‘Like somebody had poured motor oil all over’

Across the Mississippi from Pointe a la Hache, beyond the West Bank levees, lie some of the waterways that saw the heaviest oiling: Barataria Bay and its smaller inlets, Bay Jimmy and Bay Batiste.

Interactive map of Gulf oil disaster

Louisiana State University entomologist Linda Hooper-Bui tracks the numbers of ants, wasps, spiders and other bugs at 40 sites in the surrounding marshes, 18 of which had seen some degree of oiling.

She is part of a small army of researchers who have been trying to figure out what effect the spill will have on the environment of the Gulf Coast. Since 2010, she’s recorded a sharp decline in several species of insects — particularly spiders, ants, wasps and grasshoppers, which sit roughly in the middle of the food web.

They’re top predators among insects but food for birds and fish.

Hooper-Bui said she expected their numbers to bounce back the following year: “Instead, what we saw was worse.”

The reason, she suspects, is that the oil that sank into the bottom of the marsh after the spill hasn’t broken down at the same rate as the crude that floated to the surface.

Instead, it’s in the sediments, still giving off fumes that are killing the insects.

Some napthalenes — crude oil components most commonly known for their use in mothballs — appear to have increased since the spill, she said.

“They’re volatile, and they’re toxic,” Hooper-Bui said. “And they’re not just toxic to insects. They’re toxic to fish. They’re toxic to birds. They cause eggshell thinning in birds. We think this is evidence of an emerging problem.”

Hooper-Bui said crickets exposed to the contaminated muck in laboratories die, and when temperatures were increased to those comparable to a summer day, “the crickets die faster.”

By August 2011, the number of grasshoppers had fallen by 70% to 80% in areas that got oiled.

“By 2012, we were unable to find any colonies of ants in the oiled areas,” she said.

Then on August 29, 2012, Hurricane Isaac hit southeastern Louisiana. The slow-moving storm sat over Barataria Bay for more than 60 hours as it crawled onto land.

When Hooper-Bui went back to the marshes after the storm, she had a surprise waiting for her.

“We discovered in Bay Batiste large amounts of what looked like somebody had poured motor oil all over the marsh there,” she said. “About three-quarters of the perimeter of northern Bay Batiste was covered in this oil.”

The chemical fingerprint of the oil matched the oil from the ruptured BP well, Hooper-Bui said. Other scientists confirmed that Isaac kicked up tar balls from the spill as far east as the Alabama-Florida state line, more than 100 miles from where the storm made its initial landfall.

Far from the shoreline, patches of oil fell to the bottom of the Gulf in a mix of sediment, dead plankton and hydrocarbons dubbed “marine snow.” It fouled corals near the wellhead, and it’s still sitting there.

“If you took a picture of a core (sample) that was collected today and took a picture of a core that was taken in September 2010, they look the same,” University of Georgia oceanographer Samantha Joye said.

“What’s really strange to me is, the material is not degrading,” Joye added. “There’s something about this stuff, the carbon in these layers, that’s not degrading.”

Normally, microbes go to work on free-floating hydrocarbons almost immediately, digesting the compounds. The controversial large-scale use of chemical dispersants was supposed to accelerate that process by breaking up the oil into smaller droplets that could be more easily consumed.

But that’s not happening to this layer, Joye said, and the reason is unclear.

“The first thing everyone asks is, ‘Do you think it’s dispersants?’ And I can honestly tell you, we don’t know,” she said.

During the spill, scientists warned that fish eggs and larvae, shrimp, coral and oysters were potentially most at risk from the use of dispersants. The Environmental Protection Agency later reported that testing found the combination of oil and dispersants to be no more toxic than the oil alone.

But that’s no comfort to Encalade, who could watch planes spray dispersant on the slick from the marina where he keeps his two boats.

“We know from history, whenever you put soap in the water around camps and stuff like that, oysters don’t reproduce,” he said. “And we’ve heard BP say over and over again, ‘Oh, it’s like detergent.’ That’s the worst thing in the world you can do to an oyster.”

The impact of these dispersants on marine life is still an open question, and it’s something that’s under review by scientists involved in the Natural Resource Damage Assessment, the federally run, BP-funded effort to figure out what the spill did to the Gulf Coast.

That assessment could take several years.

As scientists sort out the data, the Gulf fishing communities from Louisiana to Florida are still dealing with the impact of the spill. When you look at the entire expanse of the ocean, there isn’t a huge amount of oil, explained Ian MacDonald, an oceanographer at Florida State University.

“You have to look hard to find any oil at all,” he said.

But where the oil has been found, MacDonald said, the damage is “intense and widespread.”

There is some good news: Some studies indicate that commercial fish species in different parts of the Gulf escaped the worst. Recent research at Alabama’s Dauphin Island Sea Lab found that young shrimp and blue crabs off Bayou La Batre, the state’s major seafood port, showed no sign of decline since the spill.

But that’s no consolation for Donny Waters, a Pensacola, Florida, fisherman who has been involved with efforts to rebuild the red snapper populations off the Florida panhandle.

“I’m still catching fish. I’m not saying everything’s dead,” Waters said. “But it’s taking me longer to catch my fish. I’m not seeing the snappers farther around reefs, whether they’re natural or artificial. I’m not seeing the reefs repopulate nearly as fast since the oil spill.”

‘BP has retired me’

Like many in the trade, Encalade and the other guys on his dock in Pointe a la Hache can spin epic tales. But these days, they’re not about the catch. More often, they’re about the red tape and low-ball offers they’ve had to deal with in the compensation process set up after the spill — a process they say is stacked in favor of big operators.

“I got guys been fishing out here all their life. They’ve got trip tickets, more than you can imagine,” Encalade said, referring to the slips that document a boat’s daily catch. “You know what they come back and tell a man his whole life is worth? $40,000.”

The oil, the catch and the money: All converge at the big federal courthouse on Poydras Street in New Orleans, where squadrons of lawyers have massed for what promises to be a protracted brawl to figure out how much BP will end up paying for the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

BP says it has shelled out $32 billion for the disaster, including $14 billion for cleanup. It’s also spent $300 million on everything from testing seafood to its ad campaign that encourages people to come back to the Gulf, and it pledged $500 million for research into the environmental effects of the disaster.

The company has paid to help replace oyster reefs in Mississippi and Louisiana and rebuild sand dunes and sea turtle habitats in Alabama and northwest Florida. In addition to monitoring part of the Gulf coastline, BP spokesman Scott Dean said, the company has planted new grass in the Louisiana marshes, where the losses sped up erosion already blamed for the loss of an area the size of Manhattan every year.

But of about 13,000 holes drilled into the beaches and marshes in search of settled oil, Dean said, only 3% have found enough to require cleanup, he said.

“The vast majority of the work has been done,” Dean said. But when previously undiscovered oil from the Deepwater Horizon blowout does turn up, “We take responsibility for the cleanup,” he said.

Last year, the company agreed to pay $7.8 billion to individuals and businesses who filed economic, property and health claims. But in March, the company asked a judge to halt those payments, arguing that it was facing hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars in payouts for “fictitious losses.”

It’s also pleaded guilty to manslaughter charges and fined $4 billion in the deaths of the 11 men killed aboard the rig and been temporarily barred from getting new federal contracts.

Now BP is back in court, battling to avoid a finding of gross negligence that would sock it with penalties up to $4,300 per barrel under the Clean Water Act — another $17 billion-plus by the federal government’s estimate of the spill. BP says that figure is at least 20% too high.

The plaintiffs include the federal government, the states affected by the disaster and people like Encalade and Barisich, who have rejected previous settlement offers from BP.

Freddie Duplessis, whose boat is tied up next to Encalade’s, settled with the company. He said he received about $250,000 from BP after the spill, including money the company paid to hire his boat for the cleanup effort. That’s about what he says he would have made in six months of fishing before the spill, before expenses.

“I’ve been all right. I’ve been paying my bills, but what I’m gonna do now?” asked Duplessis, 54. “You’re still gonna have bills. Everything I’ve got is mine, but I’ve got to maintain it.”

But proving just how much damage can be blamed on the oil spill will be a difficult task in the courtroom. That’s where the Natural Resource Damage Assessment, launched after the disaster and partly paid for by BP, comes in. And right now, the studies that make up that assessment are closely held, ready to be played like a hole card in poker.

“There’s a substantial amount of fisheries work that’s not actually going to see the light of day until after the court case is resolved,” USF’s Murawski said.

The region’s seafood landings largely returned to normal in 2011, after the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration closed most of the Gulf to fishing during the blowout, NOAA data show. And BP notes that across the four states that saw the most impact — Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida — shrimp and finfish catches were up in 2012 compared with the average haul between 2007 and 2009.

Blue crab was off about 1%. And while oysters regionwide remained 17% below 2007-09 figures, the company says that the flooding that hit the region in 2011 has been blamed for some of that downturn, again by dumping more fresh water into the coastal estuaries.

But Gulf-wide, shrimp landings in 2011 and 2012 were about 15% below the 2000-09 average, according to figures compiled by Mississippi State University’s Coastal Research and Extension Center.

And in Louisiana, there’s still a pronounced downturn.

State data show that blue crab landings are off an average of 18%, and brown shrimp — the season for which the industry is now gearing up — is down 39% compared with the 2002-09 catch.

In Yscloskey, Barisich said three bayou fishermen took settlements from BP, sold their leases and walked away from the docks. As for him, at 56, he’s trying to adapt.

He’s studying for a license that will allow him to take passengers out on shrimp trawls — a kind of working vacation for tourists with a taste for the job he learned from his father.

“I can’t do what I have for the last two years,” he said.

And in Pointe a la Hache, Encalade got heartbreaking news in early April.

The public reefs in nearby Black Bay, one of the post-spill reconstruction projects, had been closed after spat turned up to protect the larvae. But the spat died, and the reefs were being reopened to allow the few remaining mature oysters to be harvested.

“All the little oysters have died, and the big oysters, you can’t make a dollar with them,” Encalade said. “BP has retired me out of the oyster business.”

March 21, 2013 4:37 PM
By Tia Benton

NEW ORLEANS – A former employee of Amtrak and CSX Transportation is suing the entities on claims that each is liable unto him for damages after he contracted non-Hodgkins lymphoma.

Joseph Tangell filed a lawsuit against CSX Transportation Inc. and National Railroad Passenger Company (AMTRAK) on Jan. 18 in the Orleans Parish Central District Court.

Tangell asserts his diagnosis of lymphoma is a result of the defendant’s alleged failure to provide protective equipment for his work environment wherein he’d been exposed to diesel exhaust, diesel fumes, toxic chemicals, welding fumes, dust, powders, dioxins and other toxins while working as a machinist.

The defendants are accused of failing to provide plaintiff with a safe work environment, failing to provide safe and adequate tools, equipment and appliances for employees and failing to free work environment of hazards.

The plaintiff is seeking a trial by jury as well as reasonable damages in the premises and cost of all legal expenses.

Joel Waltzer of Harvey-based Waltzer, Wiygul & Garside LLP will represent Tangell.

This case has been assigned to Division D Judge Lloyd J. Medley.

Case no. 2013-680.

Oil giant BP says the clean-up following the 2010 spill in the Gulf of Mexico have been a success, but many fishers disagree. As the trial to resolve the remaining civil litigation opens, DW visits communities affected.

58 year-old fisherman Byron Encalade stands in one of his two boats. He hasn’t used either of them in almost three years. The boats are just rusting here in Pointe à la Hache, a little town just south of New Orleans where the Mississippi River flows into the Gulf of Mexico. The oil spill here almost three years ago brought an end to his way of life.

“Our oysters are all dead, we can’t go into the Bayou, we haven’t fished,” he says. “Our community is being desecrated and you can’t speak about an economy, we don’t even know what that is anymore.”

It has been almost three years since the explosion of the oil rig Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico, which resulted in a leaking oil well and a spill that polluted 7000 kilometers of coastline, from Texas all the way to Florida. The brunt of the oil washed ashore in the area east and west of the Mississippi, close to New Orleans, Louisiana.

Byron Encalade has been an oyster fisherman all his life, just like his father. His family has been living in the area south of New Orleans for generations. He says this region “is the largest, richest oyster estuary probably in the world. This is the heart of Louisiana’s oyster seaground.”

But Enclade says the oysters here were were destroyed in April 2010. “The oysters are not reproducing since the oil spill,” he says.

Why have the oysters stopped reproducing?

It wasn’t the oil that killed the oysters, it was the freshwater from upstream. The area was intentionally flooded in an attempt to stop the oil from reaching the shoreline. But oysters can only survive if the salinity of the water stays within a certain range.

Ed Cake is a marine biologist and oyster specialist with the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources. He told DW how freshwater can kill an oyster. “Their osmotic mechanisms fail, ” he said. “They swell up with freshwater and burst and their systems and organs fail.” That explains why the oysters died in 2010, but Louisiana’s oyster beds still haven’t recovered.

Thomas Soniat, a biologist at the University of New Orleans, believes this is part of the normal cycle. “Even before the spill the number of oysters was fairly low.” he said, adding that 2000 was the last good season for oysters.

But Ed Cake has a different theory. He explained that an oyster larva needs a solid substrate to attach itself to in order to begin growing and forming a shell. They then usually attach to other oyster shells on an oyster bar.

“All it takes is a very, very, very thin film of sediment on those shells to prevent the new spat from attaching,” Cake said. The freshwater intended to beat back oil the oil spill may have flushed sediment into these waters.

Louisiana fisher wants BP to pay damages

According to Cake, the entire area has been exposed to oil and dispersing agents, which may also be why the baby oysters are failing to to attach to the levees. These waters, the biologist explained, also feed on micro-particles in the water. But this water is still contaminated with oil and dispersing agents released in the spill. The Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries says at least one million barrels that spewed from BP’s well blowout are still missing.

“Oil goes into their digestive gland and forms lesions,” Cake explained. “Those lesions result in the death of the animal.”

Oyster fisher Encalade, who is also the President of the Louisiana Oystermen Association, said he can understand that the government was trying to prevent the oil from washing ashore when it flushed freshwater through this area.

“We knew it was for the better good for the long run,” he said. “But the crime now is BP failing to take care of its responsibilities in these smaller fishing communities.”

Other than the original emergency payment of about 80,000 dollars (60,130 euro) Encalade said he hasn’t seen a check from BP since. Replacing his two fishing boats, now rusting in the marina, would cost 200,000 dollars (150,330 euro) each. He had to sell his trucking company in order to survive.

BP did not respond to DW’s request for an interview.

Government holding back oyster study results

Joel Waltzer is a lawyer who represents fishers affected by the BP spill. He says that the compensation packages awarded shortly after the disaster have benefitted some of the people in this community. The payout was based on a forecasted 30 percent drop in catch yields. For those who lost less than 30 percent of their regular haul, like the oyster fishers on the west side of the Mississippi River, the compensation package was a deal.

But Byron Encalade and the other oyster fishers in Pointe à la Hache lost everything. They say the original compensation package hasn’t been nearly enough to keep them going. “We want to get people’s compensation tied more closely to their losses,” Waltzer explained. “So they will have enough money to weather out the storm.”

It is difficult for anyone to say when or if the oyster beds will fully recover, which Waltzer says presents an enormous challenge when establishing how much compensation each person is entitled to. “Fishermen are being asked to decide whether to accept a settlement or not and sign away their rights, before they really know what the long-term damage is going to be,” Waltzer said.

Anyone who accepted the early settlement package is no longer eligble to apply for more. Waltzer is hoping for a decision in favor of the victims, but explained that a lack of information will make it difficult to establish the extent of the damage. An official investigation of the oil spill’s impact has been opened but the results haven’t released. Waltzer believes the government wants keep the study under wraps in order to have at least one trump card they can play in the trial against BP.

But, he doesn’t think this is the right decision.

“Government should take the position ‘our case may be weakened a bit if we release all this data when we get it, but that the public has a right to know’.”

Uncertainty wearing down locals

For now, the fishing communities here in Pointe à la Hache are still in the dark. “That’s the worst part: the unknown factor,” said Don Beshel, the owner of the boat launch at Point à la Hache’s marina. “If we could see a light at the end of the tunnel it would be nice. But right now, we don’t see anything positive going on.”

He added that up until two years ago, his business was profitable. Commercial and sports fishermen and oil companies alike would get ice, fuel and supplies from him and have their crabs, shrimp and fish unloaded. But he’s lost almost 65 percent of his sales since 2010. Beshel doesn’t know how long he’ll be able to stay in business.

He and his family of five live 30 kilometers to the north of the marina, and recently lost their house in Hurricane Isaac. The furniture factory he once owned had to close, too – they couldn’t compete with the Chinese, he says.

“I’ve been beat so many times, that I don’t see anything but bleakness,” the 55-year-old said. “A lot of people down here don’t know what their future is going to be.”

Outlook still looks grim

The Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries says there has been an increase in reports of abnormalities in fish, crabs and shrimp from Louisiana and offshore waters. Experts say the failure of the oysters to regenerate is a clear sign that the spill is still harming the fragile marine ecosystems in this region. Despite this, the seafood from the area has been declared safe to eat.

That won’t be enough to revive local economies around the marina says Billy Nungesser, from Plaquemines Parish. “I think it’s going to be a 10 or 20 year recovery,” he told DW, adding that failure to locate the missing oil would continue to impact on sales, even if the fish caught were declared healthy. He believes BP has an obligation to pay for the damage the oil spill has done, and that it would best be left to the parish to decide what to do with it.

In the meantime, the people of Pointe à la Hache are struggling. For Byron Encalade, who has four daughters and nine grandchildren, this means living with his father. “My dad is paying the light bills,” he said. “I can’t afford to pay. He is buying the groceries and everything else. I am totally honest with you, the senior citizens are taking care of this community with their social security and their retirement checks.”

About a hundred fishermen still live in this community, Encalade explained, and he has lost track of who is staying and who is leaving. But if the oysters are not coming back people will have no other choice but to leave the area where they have been fishing for generations.

By Benjamin Alexander-Bloch, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune
on February 22, 2013 at 12:42 PM, updated February 22, 2013 at 12:46 PM

The deadline for Hurricane Isaac flood-related loss claims once again has been extended. The cutoff date had been Thursday (Feb. 21) for most Louisiana property owners with flood insurance policies, but FEMA now has pushed that back for another 60 days.

The National Flood Insurance Program usually requires claims to be reported within 60 days from the date of loss, but this is the fourth extension that has been granted, in part because access to many homes and other buildings was delayed due to the infrastructure damage or high floodwaters.

The extension means most policyholders now have until April 22 to complete their proof of loss claims. While Isaac first made landfall in Louisiana on Aug. 28, FEMA states that, since heavy rainfall and flooding occurred for several days before and after, the date of loss — and thus the exact deadline to submit a claim, known as “proof of loss” — varies for property owners.

Failure to submit that proof of loss could cause policyholders to miss out on benefits from their flood insurance policy. As of late January, the National Flood Insurance Program had paid out about $416 million on about 13,160 claims in Louisiana since Isaac made landfall.

The latest 60-day extension will have given Louisianians 240 days from the date of their insured losses to submit a proof of loss.

“A major storm like Isaac can make it difficult for survivors to gather information that will help adjusters determine their flood insurance loss,” FEMA coordinating officer Gerard M. Stolar said after the most recent extension. “This extension eases the burden on folks who haven’t yet filed their proof of loss, and we continue to urge them to do so as soon as possible.”

Policyholders with questions about flood insurance or concerns about their claims may contact their local insurance agent, call FEMA program experts at 1.866.331.1679 or 1.866.330.7286, or visit www.floodsmart.gov.

Written by Scott Rogers

USA Speedway will be forbidden to operate its commercial racetrack in a residential neighborhood near Sterlington following a ruling by a Union Parish district court.

The lawsuit was filed by 59 residents in 3rd Judicial District Court in August 2010 seeking damages against USA Speedway’s owners Jerry and Casey Hobson. The plaintiffs also sought a permanent injunction against the operation of the racetrack.

The lawsuit claimed USA Speedway negatively affected the residents’ quality of life and posed a threat to their health.

In his ruling, District Court Judge Wayne Smith said while the court was not unsympathetic to the plight of the defendants, it was “abundantly clear that the plaintiffs are entitled to the permanent injunction prayed for and damages, if damage is proven, at a later time.”

He said the operation of the racetrack is “injurious and offensive to persons residing in the community and interferes with their enjoyment of their respective properties.”

Attorney Clay Garside, who represented the plaintiffs, said the residents were agreeable to the racetrack operating at more reasonable times, but the owners refused, opting for an “all or nothing” decision from the court.

“The residents are overjoyed,” Garside said of the court’s ruling. “This has been a big burden on them and it ruined their weekends for years. It was clearly oppressive.”

The group of residents joined Louisiana Environmental Action Network and received advice from LEAN’s regional director Cheryl Slavant throughout the process. She organized a meeting with residents and the racetrack owners, along with its racers before establishment of USA Speedway just off Louisiana 2 and about a half-mile west of Sterlington.

She told USA Speedway officials that almost every time a racetrack is established in a residential neighborhood, the residents sue, and they win.

“They think no one will complain about the loss of enjoyment of their personal property if they put racetracks in people’s backyards,” Slavant said. “Nothing against racetracks or racers, but it’s common sense. Just put it where it belongs.”

Most of the residents who sued USA Speedway live within one mile of the racetrack, which opened in 2009.

The racetrack operated on Friday nights and sometimes Saturday nights with races beginning at 7 p.m. and sometimes lasting until 2 a.m., according to the lawsuit.

The plaintiffs alleged the dirt track created a large amount of airborne dust that intruded upon their property and created a noise level they considered a nuisance.

Four plaintiffs testified before the court. They all said they experienced significant agitation, anger, dread of the coming weekend races and significant sleep interruption and sleep disturbance.

The office number listed on USA Speedway’s website is no longer in service. Cellphones for Jerry and Casey Hobson listed on the racetrack’s website are not accurate numbers.

Garside said USA Speedway’s attorneys indicated they would file an appeal with the 2nd Circuit Court within the next 30 days.

By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News

A persistent, mysterious “oil sheen” in the Gulf of Mexico near the site of BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster grew to more than seven-miles long and one-mile wide during a recent stretch of calm seas, based on aerial observations made by a former NASA physicist turned environmental activist.

“We had maybe three or four days (of calm weather) and that’s all it took for the stuff to build up considerably,” Bonny Schumaker, the physicist who now runs the non-profit On Wings of Care, which makes regular flights over regions of the Gulf affected by the 2010 oil spill.

In a flight report from Jan. 27 posted on the group’s website, she described the oily expanse as “huge.”

Schumaker first noticed the sheen in September 2012, when it was also reported by BP to the National Response Center, the point of contact for all oil spills and other discharges into the environment. Since then, BP has inspected the well site four times with underwater robots and found it secure.

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The company “also capped and plugged an abandoned piece of subsea equipment known as a cofferdam that was identified as a potential source of the sheen,” reads a statement BP provided to NBC News via email on Wednesday.

The cofferdam is the 40-foot-tall, 86-ton steel containment dome that was used in the early stages of the response in an attempt to trap the leaking oil and funnel it to the surface.

“BP continues to work closely with the U.S. Coast Guard to investigate possible sources of a sheen in the vicinity of the (2010 spill site),” the company’s statement said.

Source a mystery
According to Schumaker, scientists who have sampled the sheen on several occasions “have consistently found the presence of alpha olefiens, which is a chemical bond signature of a man-made chemical you would not find in pure crude form.”

That suggests, she explained, that the source of the sheen is “residual material coming from the wreckage.” If so, as far as impact is concerned, that is good news since it “would imply that it is finite in volume and temporary in time. There will be an end to it.”

Ian MacDonald is an oceanographer and oil spill expert at Florida State University. Another possibility, he explained to NBC News, is that the sheen is from a “natural seep that somehow became more active than it was before because prior to 2011 or so we had not seen abundant oil slicks at that location.”

Images from Schumaker’s flights also indicate the presence of a new drilling platform in the vicinity of the Deepwater Horizon incident and these fresh oil sheens.

“That doesn’t indicate culpability on anybody’s part — I want to emphasize that,” MacDonald said. “But it does indicate that if you’re trying to do due diligence and monitoring a post-accident site of great interest the way the Deepwater Horizon site is, these are some of the things that you face.”

Whatever the source, the volume of oil coming to the surface is no cause for alarm, MacDonald noted. There are many natural seeps in the Gulf of Mexico that produce similar-sized persistent surface sheens. “It doesn’t rise to the level of being an imminent threat to wildlife or the marine ecosystem,” he said.

The concern, he noted, is trying to sort out its source. “The chemical data are a bit ambiguous.” Some analyses he’s seen suggest the presence of drilling fluid, which is consistent with what Schumaker has heard. But other analyses, from other sources that he said he’s privy to, find no drilling fluid.

In that case, it’s possible that the wreckage in 2010 somehow opened up a new fault on the seafloor. That possibility is inconsistent with BP’s findings, but would nevertheless indicate potential for an indefinite release of oil.

Dearth of wildlife
Regardless of the source of the sheen, more disheartening to Schumaker is the “dearth of marine life” in a 30 to 50 mile radius of the site of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. She’s flies just about every month all year long.

“Since the fall of 2011, now about 14 months, I see no turtles, few if any dolphins, few if any rays — Manta rays, cownose, golden rays, any of them — few sharks, few bait balls, all of the things we used to see,” she said.

That doesn’t mean the wildlife is dead, she noted, but what they eat may no longer be plentiful. As a result, they are going elsewhere to find food.

A study published in August 2012 found that dispersants used during the spill response may have damaged the microoganisms at the bottom of the food chain, which would have dire implications for fish and larger sea animals.

“I guess the Gulf of Mexico in these parts is a stinky, dead desert for its previous visitors,” Schumaker said in an email to NBC News.

John Roach is a contributing writer for NBC News. To learn more about him, check out his website.

Crabber Dung Tran, a Vietnamese immigrant, says the Gulf oil spill destroyed 300 of his crab traps and diminished the harvest.

By Emily Pickrell

December 2, 2012

CHAUVIN, LA. – Even the lawyers and accountants poring through the 1,200-page Gulf oil spill settlement sometimes grumble about deciphering the intentions in its legal language, and Vietnamese immigrant crabber Dung Tran faces an even more daunting language barrier.

For him, the proposed settlement unveiled in March represents only the latest chapter in a legal ordeal made even more confusing by his limited English.

Since the 2010 spill from BP’s Macondo well, times have been hard for Tran, 46, of Chauvin, La. The spill damaged his 300 crab traps beyond repair, and now he struggles with a greatly diminished crab harvest and high fuel prices.

“Before the spill, the crabbing was decent, but now I only net about $50 for a day of work,” Tran said. “If a hurricane or another natural disaster happens next year, it will wipe me out.”

Tran, who supports a wife and three children, has been living off of savings and his reduced income as his damage claim has worked its way through a previous process and now the one created under the March settlement.

Hundreds waiting

He is among hundreds of Vietnamese immigrant fishermen waiting to be compensated for their losses by the $2.3 billion Seafood Compensation fund – part of the larger proposed settlement between BP and Gulf Coast residents who suffered economic or health damages from the spill.

A New Orleans federal judge tentatively approved the deal and is expected to give it final approval soon.

The seafood fund would compensate vessel owners, commercial fishermen and their crews for damages suffered from April 20, 2010, when the Macondo well blew out, to last April 16.

About 3,000 Vietnamese immigrants in the Gulf Coast area are in the fishing industry, said Anh-Dao Nguyen, director of the Southeast Asian Fisherfolk Association, an organization formed in 2011 to provide outreach and education for Asian fishermen struggling to understand their legal rights after the accident.

They find the many legal documents and notification letters perplexing, while their language limitations have made it equally difficult to find other employment.

“I don’t know what to do other than what my lawyer tells me,” said Tran, with Anh-Dao Nguyen translating his Vietnamese.

John-Hoa Nguyen, a community organizer who works with the Southeast Asian Fisherfolk Association, said that the language gap left the Vietnamese especially vulnerable immediately after the spill, when many were coaxed by lawyers to sign up for representation without understanding their rights or what they were signing.

“There were a lot of lawyers who flew in out of space and they took advantage of the ignorance of the fishermen,” John-Hoa Nguyen said.

Vietnamese residents say the language barrier also resulted in preferential treatment for native English-speakers when BP hired boats and crews to clean up after the spill.

“Even if I wanted to do clean-up work, they are not going to hire me because I don’t speak English,” said Tran, who went through the training to do clean-up after the spill, then spent a year waiting for a call that never came.

“I don’t have enough education to make a living on shore,” he said. “If I am unable to continue crabbing, I have no idea what I will do onshore.”

A key deficiency

That underscores what the advocates for the Vietnamese see as a key deficiency in the settlement.

“For the Vietnamese fishermen who are 40 and 50 and older, the BP proposal is to train them for another skill, but it is very difficult when there is a language problem and a different mindset,” John-Hoa Nguyen said.

“To teach them another skill is very difficult. Fisherman who do not even know how to write in their own language and their thoughts are very simple – if they can’t fish, what would they do?”

Many Vietnamese fishermen have complained that the reductions in the catch and the long wait since the 2010 accident are forcing them to accept the offer on the table now because they cannot afford to wait out a fight.

“We have no income and we have no choice,” said Harvey, La., shrimper Thien Le, “We have about 60 percent of what we had before.”

“If you don’t have money, you are going to be pressured into accepting a payment,” he said through Anh-Dao Nguyen, “even though you know it is not enough.”

Tran said five of the six Vietnamese crabbing families that live in the Chauvin community took $25,000 in a quick-pay settlement that was offered in the months after the spill.

Tran, who waited two years and received an offer of $50,000 – about a year’s pre-spill income – said that his neighbors regret their decision, but believe they had no realistic choice.

Tran plans to accept the offer, because his lawyer told him he otherwise might wait years with little chance of getting any more.

“I heard that the judge emphasized the fairness between BP and the fishermen,” he said. “But I don’t see any fairness for the fishermen in this.”

‘They need one voice’

With the process of compensating fisherman for their spill losses now in its third year, the Southeast Asian Fisherfolk Association provides translation services on the litigation and helps the fishermen understand and protect their rights.

“We know that we have to assimilate and excel in order to survive,” John-Hoa Nguyen said. “In the past, it would be very difficult to get the fishermen together, but now, they see there is a need for it, that they need one voice. They know the ocean very well, but when it comes to onshore, they knew nothing. But now, they are learning what is happening to them and what they need to know to make it in the future.”

But while the association and other community groups have raised the fishermen’s awareness, their concerns about the long term damage persist.

“The Vietnamese community is historically an extremely self-reliant group and community and this spill has eroded their ability to sustain themselves,” said Joel Waltzer, a New Orleans attorney whose clients include several of the fishermen.

After Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast in 2005, he said, Vietnamese immigrants were among the first to rebuild.

“But the oil spill is more pernicious because it does not give something that is so readily fixed,” Waltzer said. “They can fix their homes, boats, road, but they can’t fix the water.”

emily.pickrell@chron.com

Read more: http://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/For-these-spill-victims-legalese-is-just-one-4085540.php#ixzz2EBtOruED

Posted Dec 1, 2012 2:20 AM CST
By Rachel M. Zahorsky

The fear of possibly unaffordable legal fees is paralyzing access to legal aid for a growing number of moderate-income Americans, as we reported in “Biloxi Blues” in last month’s ABA Journal. And while would-be clients, courts and lawyers struggle to find cost structures that bridge the gap between needs and services, another barrier was repeatedly cited while I was speaking with folks along the Gulf Coast: distrust of the private bar.

Potential oil spill claimants, community activists and local attorneys derided the outcomes of town hall meetings in Mississippi and Louisiana during the immediate aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Billed as educational forums about the claims process (which often included free lunches from out-of-town-lawyers), session attendees were regularly corralled and pressed to sign client contracts.

And while some meetings offered translators for the highly sought-after Vietnamese fishermen with potentially larger claims, others didn’t. That only added to the confusion.

SPREADING DISTRUST

“That’s when everyone started to get freaked out,” says Clay J. Garside, a partner at New Orleans-based Waltzer & Wiygul. His law firm has served the local Vietnamese community for 20 years. Garside says people were saying: “What is the attorney’s role here? What are they doing? It feels like a trap.”

For a number of unlucky claimants who signed the contracts, their new lawyers swiftly disappeared. They were left to flounder alone, uncertain of how to even contact the attorneys and unable to proceed with their claims, says Adrianne Williams, a project supervisor at the New Orleans nonprofit organization Vietnamese Initiatives in Economic Training. Overpromised and underdelivered results by private lawyers also ran rampant after the proposed billion-dollar settlement with BP was announced, according to Stephanie Short, a staff attorney at Southeast Louisiana Legal Services in New Orleans.

Because Short’s services are federally funded, she often has to turn away would-be oil spill victims who earn more than the mandated income restrictions. “Those people are more inclined to seek assistance elsewhere before going to a private attorney,” she says. And that decision to look elsewhere isn’t solely because those people don’t have access to funds for an attorney, adds staff lawyer Timothy McEvoy, Short’s colleague at SLLS. Distrust of the private bar stands near the top of the list for many would-be clients who are suspicious of high contingency fees charged by private lawyers to navigate a claims process that is, in theory, designed to be done without legal aid. As a result, McEvoy says, “you have very disparate views on the worth of an attorney’s work as well as the quality of that work.”

“A lot of the public have a very negative view of the profession, and of how much money we charge for our services. In some cases they are right and in others they are dead wrong,” he says. “We need to do a better job of showing clients what the value-add is for our profession.”