Judge reconsiders ruling as oil spill workers await fate
NEW ORLEANS Mark Mead and patagonia women's synchilla fleece vesttwo buddpatagonia sale jacketsies were fishing less than 20 miles away when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig burst into flames and lit up the night sky.The trio rushed toward the floating inferno to help pull bodies out of the water. And as oil continued to gush out of BP s broken well over the next four months, Mead helped again as a part of BP s cleanup effort, picking up contaminated boom in the waters off Perdido Key at the Florida Alabama line.Despite his heroics, Mead now finds himself among an estimated 20,000 coastal residents and cleanup workers who are part of a medical damages settlement class, but would be blocked frompatagonia vest closeout settlement payments under a disputed reading of onepatagonia better sweater clearance phrase buried in an agreement more 1,000 pages long. District Judge Carl Barbier, who initially backed BP s reading of the settlement, but now is reconsidering and realizing that the current interpretation might relegate most of the class members to just what the settlement was supposed to avoid years of costly litigatpatagonia rain coat reviews0ion.BP medical settlement s new interpretation could cut out thousands High exposure, little helpsaid early on the CEO that they take care of us.For Mead, it s been traumatic. In 2010, he told CNN thapatagonia down sweater fullt he was suffering from serious anxiety from his experience in the chaos of the rig explosion. Since then, he s been prescribed a host of other medication to deal with conditions he says he got from exposure to the oil and Corexit, a chemical dispersant BP applied to the oil to break it down into tiny droplets.During his cleanup work on June 21, 2010, Mead fepatagonia guide pants ukll into the sludgy oil and chemical laced Gulf waters. He was rushed to a BP facility on shore, where reports indicated he had high exposure to oil on most of his body and suffered a burning sensation on his skin.But the medical professional provided by BP wrote it off as minor and told him to shower thoroughly and return to work. Mead said that about a year later, he started having monthly outbreaks of painful, swollen lesions all over his back, arms and legs.He was diagnosed with chronic dermatitis, one of the conditions that would qualify for the maximum $60,700 payment for a chronic condition under the settlement. But the disputed interpretation of BP s medical claims settlement says Mead was diagnosed too late and must wait for his individual case to be litigated. BP said early on the CEO that they d take care of us, Mead said. And they haven t. Meadpatagonia rain coat reviews1 is also one of 11,000 people who filed medical claims with Claims Administrator Matt Garretson but have notpatagonia rain coat reviews been paid.Garretson said the language of the agreement was clear and Barbier upheld that in July.Arguments made in Barbier s courtroom last week suggest that ruling could force the vast majority of medical settlement class members into the kind of protracted litigation that kept victims of the Exxon Valdez spill waiting for more than 20 years. That has the judge concernepatagonia outlet store 629d and reconsidering his July order.BP contends that the diagnosis deadline that appears in the settlement s definition for later manifested physical conditions should also apply to conditions that claimants say showed up right awaypatagonia coupons unlimited, such as eye damage, irritant induced asthma and chronic dermatitis.BP attorney Kevin Hodges told Barbier last week that anyone affected by the typepatagonia discount code homes of chronic conditions covered by the settlement surely would have seen a doctor before the April 16, 2012 deadline for diagnosis. But Barbier was skeptical, noting that most of the cleanup workers were likely uninsured and would not have an easy time paying for a doctor s visit.Several cleanup workers said they had a hard enough time affording a regular doctor s visit, let alone the type of specific examinations that they later learned were required for a full diagnosis under the settlement. I hadn t worked since 2010, and that had a lot to do with going to see a good doctor, because they want cash money up front and I don t have no I m homeless, I don t have nowhere to stay and family has been helping me all of this time. It s just been bad, said Donald Dumas of Pensacola, Fla.Heather Lindsay, a Milton, Fla. based attorney representing hundreds of cleanup workers, bristled at BP s contention that the cut off date was intended for chronic conditions from the start, to prevent claimants from getting fraudulent diagnoses after the tepatagonia rain coat reviews2rms of the settlement were made public. That s absurd because that assumes that medical doctors are not going to be ethical and they re going to provide whatever diagnosis we tell them, Lindsay said. Doesn t everyone know how little doctors like lawyers? She said several factors made a diagnosis in the first two years difficult. In addition to the prohibitivpatagonia rain coat reviews3e cost for her clients, several of whom were homeless at the time of the spill, Lindsay said most thought they had something they were calling the BP crud, some kind of contagious cough workers assumed was just going around. Also, many of them went to doctors right away but, like Dumas doctors at an indigent clinic, they did not have the expertise to recognize the specific diagnoses later outlined in the settlement. Lindsay acknowledged that once the terms of the settlement became known in 2012, she and other lawyers made sure their clients got the types of medical tests necessary to get the proper diagnoses.
