The state of Minnesota will put up $38 million to divide among 158 victims as compensation for losses sustained in last year’s collapse of a bridge under Interstate 35 in Minneapolis. Thirteen were killed in the accident, which was the result of structural defects.  Law buffs might reasonably wonder why victims of the levee collapse in New Orleans aren’t entitled to similar relief.  

To claim part of the award, approved by both houses of the Minnesota state assembly, the victims, many of them now pursuing civil lawsuits for negligence, will have to release the state from legal liability. The total comes out to about a quarter-million dollars per person, but a third of the money will be used to sustain victims with severe permanent injuries. Victims of the 9/11 attacks made a somewhat more lucrative settlement of potential claims against the federal government and the airlines.

New Orleans flood victims, unlike the Minnesota claimants, stand to receive nothing (except the modest emergency assistance already distributed) to compensate them for their losses. Some would say that racial prejudice explains the injustice apparent in the disparate treatment of these two classes of victims. A simpler explanation is the daunting size of this class of plaintiffs. The total awarded to victims of lesser catastrophes, like 911, would pale by comparison with the scale of the damage, in dollars, to New Orleans and its residents. The losses could run to astronomical amounts, equal to weeks or even months of war costs.

The flood victims’ claims are no less meritorious than those of the other plaintiffs. The negligence–if it was negligence and not deliberate malfeasance–is patent, at least as egregious as the misconduct of those who let the planes crash into the buildings and those who let the bridge shudder till it gave way. Most responsible authorities had long known that the levees couldn’t survive a severe hurricane, but nothing was done to prepare for that inevitable event. Worse, among the officials who neglected the levees were people who celebrated the displacement of New Orleans’ African-American underclass, leading many of us to believe that the flood was the result of purposeful neglect by racists.

In addition to the uncounted dead and missing (try to find reliable numbers on the flood’s toll in and around New Orleans), hundreds of thousands remain displaced in the diaspora. They were so poor before the flood that the rest of us are supposed to believe that their losses were trivial. Today they have nothing, but nobody is proposing that they be recompensed like the victims in New York, Washington and Minneapolis. Americans should be asking why.

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