Louisiana Insurance

PASCAGOULA, Miss - One year after Hurricane Katrina flattened their ranch-style house here in masonry Washington Avenue, Tina Lee received $ 2500 of its owner’s policy for housing expenses.

Your house four bedrooms, a block from the beach, suffered nearly $ 300000 damage, but their insurer said the property has been destroyed by flooding, not wind. The distinction is important: a standard owner’s policy pays for damage of the hurricane winds and rain, but it does not cover floods.

“They say that the point of (my neighbor’s) floating on the house and landed here in my house,” says Lee, 44, live in a room with an RV. But: “We had over 100 mph wind before the water even here.

Your neighbors - whose house he crushed bits - just happen to Richard Scruggs, Mississippi lawyer, has in the tobacco industry and asbestos. Much of his house, with that of his brother, Senator Trent Lott, was reduced to ashes and debris after Katrina. For months, has been championing Lee Scruggs’s Fall, and thousands of other homeowners Gulf Coast in action against the insurer.

In this storm vernarbter-region, thousands of homeowners are still waiting for payments for damage. Thousands more are dispute insurance payments for damage caused by the hurricane. Many of these cases - winding their way through state and federal courts - are likely to take years before deciding to delay the reconstruction of houses and thus contribute to a higher rate of separation.

How do these bitter disputes ausschütteln is also a big influence, that insurers will continue to provide policy owners along the bay, and at what price. Already some of the biggest insurers, including State Farm and Allstate, have pulled back on the house reporting.

The insurance dispute is the second disaster to take LA, “says Madro band Aries, a lawyer representing the owners in a class action against LA appeal the insurer of last resort, the high cost of politics, it is not politics by the way. One year after the storm: “We have thousands of people who are still in respect of a fine or a value at all.”

Insurance companies have paid nearly $ 15.5 billion for damage caused by Katrina in the houses, but billions of dollars over the USA are involved in these complaints.

Robert Hartwig, chief economist at the Insurance Information Institute (III), a research group funded by insurers, said that “regardless of these defects process lawyers argue that prices gross misrepresentation of the truth. We have hundreds of thousands of applications quickly and steadily. ”

Some homeowners have no assurance that payments by the Confederation receive aid, tap pension funds or take credit for reconstruction. Many others remain in FEMA trailers or with friends living in insurance money, because: “There is simply no money in a lockbox for these people,” said Patrick Buckley of the Center for Justice and Democracy, a consumer Advocacy Group.

Lee has a $ 250000, 30 years, Small Business Administration loans for the construction of one to three bedrooms, 1935 square feet to the old village house. It is smaller and several meters higher than the original.

Lee hopes that the RV, she and her husband are now and in the new home of Christmas. But it does not expect that their battle with their insurance company soon to its end: “I plan to fight against all the way to the Supreme Court.”

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Last week, the insurer won the first round of legal battles, a federal judge said the couple in Mississippi has not been covered for most of Katrina damage in their homeland. About your region (NFS) policy clearly exclude flooding, the hurricane has caused tidal waves in the Gulf region, that the house destroyed, judges LT Jr. Senter decided.

Floods, or water seeping through the floor of the house, is a national policy on flood Insurance Program. But Scruggs, if successful German argued that the tidal waves in relation to hurricanes, it should be paid to the owner of the policy.

Senter Richter’s Denial-of-this statement reverberating throughout the country because he is chairman of Katrina on hundreds of insurance disputes in Mississippi. It could also influence the actions in LA, because most insurers owners of the same policy at the national average, said John Ellison, a manager at Anderson Kill & Olick law firm that has continued insurers of the LA behalf of homeowners.