David Hammer

WWL-TV, New Orleans

NEW ORLEANS — After taking more than two months to reconsider, a federal judge is sticking with a decision that could leave thousands of ailing cleanup workers from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill out of a medical claims settlement with BP.

U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier originally ruled in July that the oil giant's medical claims settlement was "unambiguous" and set April 16, 2012, as a cutoff date for cleanup workers and coastal residents to have been diagnosed with a chronic condition in order to qualify for payments of up to $60,700 under the settlement.

In Wednesday's order, Barbier again said the "contract terms are unambiguous," but acknowledged that he, like plaintiffs' attorneys, were caught off-guard by the results — which push a large number of claimants into litigation and out of a settlement that was supposed to avoid the need for more litigation.

Barbier said he would have been empowered to order new settlement terms if they had led to "absurd" results, but he said the results, while unexpected, were not "absurd." He noted that claimants diagnosed after April 16, 2012, still had rights to pursue litigation or workers' compensation claims.

Plaintiffs' lawyers said that's not what was intended by the settlement. The agreement never set a diagnosis deadline in defining chronic conditions, but in a separate section of the settlement says that another category of illness, known as a "later-manifested physical condition," is one that is diagnosed after April 16, 2012.

Attorneys who represent hundreds of cleanup worker claims, mostly in Florida, said that was supposed to address issues like cancer that take time to develop after exposure to carcinogens in the oil and cleanup chemicals.

The plaintiffs' lawyers filed documents in court stating that as many as 20,000 clients would be shut out of the settlement by that interpretation.

They said those clients had signed sworn statements saying they suffered ailments within the first 72 hours after working on the beach, but did not get diagnosed with a chronic condition until much later, either because they couldn't afford to see a doctor or didn't make the connection between their work with the oil and chemicals in 2010 and the skin and respiratory problems that flared up later.

Barbier did offer a nugget of hope to those claimants by ordering the medical claims administrator, Matthew Garretson, to come up with a new policy in the next 21 days to clarify the terms of a release claimants must sign when they collect compensation for acute illnesses.