Figures

Times-Pic:

How much money Louisiana homeowners can collect on their insurance policies depends a lot on which hurricane hit them.

Federal judges in New Orleans have ruled that the amount of money
Hurricane Katrina victims can recover from their homeowners insurance policies is limited by the amount they received from the National Flood Insurance Program.

But federal judges in Lake Charles have ruled that Hurricane Rita
victims can potentially collect the full value of both the flood and the
wind policies, meaning that they could end up with payouts totaling more than the value of their homes.

The discrepancy isn't likely to be resolved anytime soon either... unless it goes in the wrong direction.

Although the federal courts on either side of the state are at
loggerheads, so far no one's appealed to the 5th U.S. Circuit to set the law of the land, because it's been in no one's interest to do so.

Plaintiffs attorneys in New Orleans say that after losing arguments
on the valued policy law and whether levee breach flooding was properly excluded from insurance policies at the federal appeals court, they figured they didn't have a shot on the flood-offset question in federal court.

After losing the flood-offset ruling in the consolidated Rita
litigation, State Farm didn't appeal, either.

After winning so many flood-offset rulings in New Orleans, State
Farm counsel Peter Martin said it wasn't worth it to bother appealing Minaldi's ruling. "We view this as kind of a minority decision," Martin said.

But Cameron Food Mart v. Lloyds could break the deadlock. Bob Fenet, a Baton Rouge attorney representing Lloyds, said he's talking with his client about appealing to the 5th U.S. Circuit.