Nearly six years after the Hard Rock Hotel construction project pancaked from the top down onto a downtown New Orleans intersection, killing three workers and injuring more than a hundred others, the legal fight over who pays for it is finally over. Orleans Parish Civil District Court Judge Kern Reese approved a $106 million global settlement on Aug. 6, closing out a consolidated case that had grown to include 490 plaintiffs against 21 defendants over more than six years of litigation.
“This will be an honor to, you know, these claimants that have been through so much,” Mark Glago, co-lead counsel for the plaintiffs, said of the settlement. “We are very, very happy with this $106 million.” The plaintiff group is genuinely broad: roughly 103 injured construction workers, around 200 businesses affected by the months-long closure of Canal Street after the collapse, and the families of the three workers killed, Anthony Margrette, Quinnyon Wimberly and Jose Ponce Arreola.
What the settlement doesn’t include is any public accounting of who’s paying what. Attorneys involved in negotiating the deal confirmed to local media that developer 1031 Canal Development, general contractor Citadel Builders, subcontractors and their respective insurers all agreed to contribute to the combined $106 million figure, but the specific amount each defendant and each insurer is paying remains confidential, as does the formula for how individual claimants’ payouts will be calculated. That’s a genuinely important detail for anyone hoping to read this settlement as a precedent-setting benchmark for how similar collapse claims get valued going forward: the headline number is public, but the actual liability allocation that produced it isn’t…