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GULFPORT, Miss. – People who live along the Gulf Coast know that a promise of money is not nearly as nice as it sounds. It means waiting and waiting, and raising a fuss, and then waiting some more, and consulting lawyers and talking to bureaucrats, and still waiting, and in some cases just giving up.
And now, after almost five years of fighting insurance companies and government agencies to rebuild after Hurricane Katrina, they are contemplating the prospect of going through all of that again.
It is too early to tell how the maddeningly unpredictable oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico will affect the economies that depend on the ocean and its edible inhabitants. And it is too early to judge how BP will act in providing compensation for economic losses. But recent experience does not provide comfort.
“The insurance industry and big corporations have a history of stall, deny and kind of wait you out,” said Kevin Buckle, who works for Ship Island Excursions, a charter boat company here. Buckle had such a bad experience after Hurricane Katrina that he has been pushing for a state insurance bill of rights. Like most everyone else, he is in a wait-and-see mode.
BP has a toll-free telephone number to call, and if the claim is small enough – generally, immediate loss of pay fits this category – an operator can walk a person through the process and have the claim paid within 48 hours, said Bill Salvin, a company spokesman. Any person accepting such a payment does not waive any rights against future litigation or claims. So far, around 4,700 claims have been filed, a BP spokesman said, with a little over 800 paid, almost all of them for loss of income.
Along the bayous of
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