The law, SB 469, essentially bars a levee district in New Orleans’ East Bank – the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East, or SLFPA-E – from pressing forward in its lawsuit against 97 oil and gas companies, which it blames for exposing New Orleans to catastrophic damage from hurricanes Rita and Katrina by cutting thousands of miles of pipes and canals through sensitive barrier islands and wetlands that otherwise would have protected the coastal city.

The lawsuit, filed last summer, sought to force energy companies to restore the wetlands, fill in the canals, and pay for past damages.

“We are looking to the industry to fix the part of the problem that they created,” SLFPA-E vice president John Barry told the Times-Picayune last year. “We’re not asking them to fix everything. We only want them to address the part of the problem that they created.”

SB 469 upends that effort by stipulating only certain limited groups may bring lawsuits against companies for their activities along the coast, such as oil exploration. Its backers in the state legislature, Sens. Bret Allain and Robert Adley, asserted the measure will help avoid “enriching lawyers and certain individuals” through “frivolous lawsuits.”

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Zygmunt Plater, a professor at Boston College Law who specializes in environmental law, disagrees.

"Clearly they're jumping at the snap of the fingers of the [Louisiana] Oil and Gas Association," he says. "LOGA is powerful"

Oil and gas donations, in fact, easily make up the largest chunk of campaign donations to Jindal, Allain and Adley, finance records show. And indeed, SB 469 not only halts SLFPA-E's lawsuit, but also potentially undercuts government claims against BP, whose Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, killing 11 people and spilling 210 million gallons of oil in the worst marine oil spill in history.