Austin Bay Blog

I have been following events in the New Orleans area via the Times-Picayune’s website. It’s doing an outstanding job. I wonder if the newspaper is being published on paper.

Here’s an interesting article from a Times-Picayune real estate writer — legal documents have been lost en masse. The article considers the historical dimensions as well as legal and economic impacts:

Thousands of lawyers in the metropolitan area have lost their files, their clients and their offices, but one of the biggest legal ramifications of Hurricane Katrina’s flooding waters is the probable loss of real estate records dating back to the early 1800s.

The records, which include titles, mortgages, conveyances and liens, were stored in the now-flooded basement of City Hall on Poydras Street.

In 2002, employees of Register of Conveyances Gasper Schiro began the tedious process of hand entering the records into computers, a $700,000 process that could have been contracted out and accomplished quickly but was instead done slowly by his staff to save money.

It’s unclear how much of the information has been digitized and or if the computerized information is stored safely.

If either the original records or the digitalization process is lost, it will be a major mess, said Southern University Law Center Professor Winston Riddick, who teaches real estate law. While it will be a tedious process to fix, and it can be fixed, it will be a major headache that could potentially take years.
The records involved date back to 1827, with the earliest recorded by hand in Spanish and French.

Another key graf:

Real estate records aren’t the only ones affected. Ghetti estimates that as many as 6,000, or two-thirds of the state’s attorneys, have lost offices, files and other documents critical to civil and criminal legal cases.

Several court buildings were flooded by Hurricane Katrina, including the basement in the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals and the Louisiana Supreme Court building.

For City Hall records, Sterbcow said “it’s the mortgages that’s going to be ugly. To put it mildly, how are you going to be able to prove if you own a piece of property if your records are gone? How are you going to be able to prove you have a mortgage, or one is paid off?”

The Times-Picayune is publishing stories from readers. The entire section– which reads like an “emergency blog”– is packed with information, including pleas for help. I’ll call attention to one particular story, with the headline “The Positive Stories Must Get Out.”

From “The Positive Stories…”:

Please help me to get this story out. We need to get the truth out and these people helped.

Jeff Rau, a family and now personal friend to whom I will forever be linked, and I were volunteering with a boat and pulling people out of the water on Wednesday. I have a first-hand experience of what we encountered. In my opinion, everything that is going on in the media is a complete bastardization of what is really happening. The result is that good people are dying and losing family members. I have my own set of opinions about welfare and people working to improve thier own lot instead of looking for handouts, but what is occurring now is well beyond those borders. These people need help and need to get out. We can sort out all of the social and political issues later, but human beings with any sense of compassion would agree that the travesty that is going on here in New Orleans needs to end and people’s lives need to be saved and families need to be put back together. Now.

….Eight people in particular who stood out during our rescue and whose stories deserve to be told:…

I encourage you to read the three stories about the eight people the writer encountered while working on the rescue boat.

Scroll down for the other stories. Note the one headlined “FEMA Lies” was written by a lady living in Oregon. How could she possibly know?