More from the Times-Picayune, courtesy of Austin Bay:

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?"

I've appeared and argued in the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, and can attest to the fact that it is a low-lying building subject to great damage from flood waters.

I've also had some passing experience with the land recording function in Louisiana, and if memory serves - by no means to be taken for granted these days, given the mound of gray hair on top of the memory container - the state is one in which most titles, if not all, are registered, which is to say, where the identity of all owners of interests in real estate must be confirmed by an official record, and not just the result of a search of conveyancing records and the like. If the official registrations are gone, what's left?

Not much.

It's hard to imagine that all of these records haven't long ago been digitized, and the results stored somewhere off-site.

But then, this is government we're talking about.

Must be Bush's fault.

Somehow.

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