The storm-battered Lake Charles region of Louisiana has become the epicenter of federal insurance-related lawsuits for 2021-2022, according to a new study by a nonpartisan research center in New York.
The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University found that the southwest region of Louisiana has the largest number of federal insurance lawsuits in the nation – 3,430, or about 22% of the nearly 16,000 such lawsuits filed in fiscal year 2022.
Southwest Louisiana has seen widespread property damage as a result of Hurricanes Laura and Delta in 2020, setting in motion the tidal wave of insurance litigation in that region. Lake Charles sits in the Western District of Louisiana, where the Lake Charles courthouse was shuttered for almost two years due to hurricane damage, The Advocate recently reported.
Austin Kocher, a research assistant professor, said the volume of Lake Charles cases has skyrocketed in recent months and shows no signs of slowing down.
“The sheer volume of civil insurance lawsuits in Southwest Louisiana is enormous and continues to grow even two years later, illustrating the fact that when inadequate support structures are in place, extreme weather events continue to wreak havoc in communities long after the winds subside,” Kocher told the Louisiana Record in an email.
Nationwide, litigated federal insurance claims numbered 15,910 from October 2021 to the end of August of this year, the report states. That compares to 14,310 lawsuits during the previous year.
In August, the nation recorded a record number of monthly insurance lawsuits, with 4,042 being filed and residents of the Lake Charles area, with a population of around 81,000, filing 1,643 of them, or 40% of the total, according to the analysis.
In all the federal courts within the Western District of Louisiana, 4,690 insurance lawsuits were filed so far in fiscal year 2022, the study found.