This is breaking right now:

A federal judge in New Orleans has ruled the U.S. government owes damages to residents whose homes were swamped by Hurricane Katrina’s floodwaters in 2005.

In a sometimes scathing critique of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, U.S. District Judge Stanwood Duval found “monumental negligence” in the operation and maintenance of a shipping channel called the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet.

He rejected the government’s argument that the Corps was immune from liability and had properly maintained the navigation channel, known locally as MRGO.

Flood victims had sued, arguing the widening of the channel and subsequent loss of protective wetlands turned MRGO into a speedway for Katrina’s storm surge. Judge Duval blamed government engineers for letting the shipping channel “run amok.”

Duval awarded damages of about $720,000 to four people and a business. The case has been closely watched by other Katrina victims seeking compensation from the government.

Here is the judgment:

Here is the opinion:

Transcript below the fold via WhiteHouse.gov.

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Via email from Action Factory DC. More photos available here.

Climate Advocates Call on the President to Reflect and Take Action on the Fourth Anniversary of Katrina

WASHINGTON, D.C. — International climate activists floated two roof tops in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool early Thursday afternoon in anticipation of the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. One of the roofs read, “HELP—The Water Is Rising.” The 30 ft. banner behind the roofs declared, “Prevent the Next Katrina, Restore the Gulf, Stop Global Warming.”

Saturday’s anniversary of Katrina’s landfall coincides with the 100-day countdown to the much anticipated Copenhagen climate negotiations.

“Needless to say, many New Orleanians have placed their hopes in Barack Obama. We see the effects of man-made disaster every day. Climate change is the number one long-term threat to life facing New Orleans.” said Esquizito, a New Orleans jazz and blues performer and Katrina survivor working with the climate advocates. “We’re all waiting for President Obama’s leadership,” he said.

Katrina made landfall in southeast Louisiana on August 29th, 2005. 80 percent of New Orleans was under water and at least 1,836 people lost their lives, making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in the history of the United States.

The group of concerned youth called attention to the anniversary of Katrina and the necessity of bold US leadership at the UN climate negotiations in Copenhagen this December to pass a fair, ambitious, and binding global treaty that will prevent environmental disasters of the catastrophic magnitude of Katrina in the future. According to the climate advocates, a fair, ambitious, and binding treaty includes full funding for international adaptation, so that vulnerable areas can adapt to climate threats.

A statement by the Pew Center for Global Climate Change further expresses the link between Katrina and global warming: “It would be scientifically unsound to conclude that Katrina was not intensified by global warming. A reasonable assessment of the science suggests that we will face similar events again and that powerful storms are likely to happen more often than we have been accustomed to in the past.”