I wonder if these people really, I mean really, think they’re going to get this.

Tens of thousands of people whose property was destroyed when Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed New Orleans’ protective levees have filed claims demanding the government pay astronomical sums that would be enough money to make multimillionaires of everyone in Louisiana.

The Army Corps of Engineers received 247 claims from residents, businesses and government agencies seeking $1 billion or more, according to the agency. That’s the tip of a very large iceberg: The corps, which designed and built the city’s storm protections, faces more than 489,000 claims for the damage and deaths in the post-Katrina flooding.

The claims are so massive the government could never hope to pay them. Rather, they are the hopeful — and at times inflated — requests of people reeling from losses.

Just the top filings add up to so much money that the entire annual output of the nation’s economy — $12 trillion — couldn’t pay them off, according to the corps’ listing. It is the first public accounting of the scale of damage demands the corps faces.

“That’s totally off-the-wall,” says Ashton O’Dwyer, a New Orleans lawyer handling some of the claims. He says everyone making a claim ultimately must provide evidence to back it up, “and we won’t know the real total until that happens.”…

You’ll love this part:

One claim alone seeks $3 quadrillion in damages, almost all of it for personal injury. That’s a 3 followed by 15 zeros — about 250 times the nation’s gross domestic product. A resident of a section of New Orleans that includes the hard-hit Lower 9th Ward filed another claim for $6 trillion, double the annual federal budget.

That’s a whole lotta 60-inch flat screen tvs.

How much damage was actually done? The Louisiana Recovery Authority estimates that both Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita combined caused about $100 billion. The feds have already dedicated $130 billion for recovery efforts.

(Via Hot Air)