WHEN Hurricane Katrina stormed across the Mississippi coast in August 2005, it smashed Michael McCoy’s beachfront home into matchsticks and left him with nothing but a slab of concrete foundations surrounded by fallen trees.

It has taken him almost two years, but last week McCoy finally settled his claim against one of America’s biggest insurance companies. This success was thanks in no small part to the herculean labours of an elderly trumpet-playing judge who has emerged as a hero to thousands of victims of America’s most costly natural disaster.

As the waterfront communities of the American South brace themselves for another hurricane season, Judge L T Senter of the US federal court house in Gulfport is still riding out a very different kind of storm.

The story of Senter’s emergence as the key legal authority in a bitter wrangle over insurance pay-outs has spread far beyond the battered Mississippi coast. His rulings on the nature of hurricane damage and the small print of homeowner insurance policies are being closely watched in New Orleans, which has plenty of Katrina-related problems of its own, in Florida and other Atlantic coast states, and not least in London, the world’s reinsurance capital.

It was not what anyone in Mississippi had imagined when Senter, who contracted polio as a teenager and uses a wheelchair, announced his retirement from the northern district court several years ago. At his farewell party the judge picked up the trumpet he had often played in his chambers after hours and entertained his guests with a haunting jazz version of Amazing Grace.

His trumpet went with him when he headed south to a comfortable sinecure as a back-up judge in Gulfport. Then Katrina struck and the legal system in southern Mississippi was plunged into chaos.

“It was pretty obvious that with this kind of destruction there were going to be lots and lots of insurance disputes,” said Ron Cochran, who helps to run Senter’s chambers. “But Judge Senter turned out to be the only judge in the district who didn’t own property here and didn’t have his own claim against the insurance companies.”

With the region’s other judges all compromised by their own insurance wrangles, Senter, 73, effectively took control of what has proved to be one of the most contentious disputes spawned by Katrina. At stake is not just legal nit-picking over insurance policy language, but also the broader issue of whether Katrina victims will ever regain the confidence - and the money - to rebuild a coastline where construction projects are still heavily outnumbered by “For Sale” signs on piles of rubble.

It did not take Jack Denton long to realise that he was going to have the busiest year of his life. Like just about everyone else in Biloxi, just along the coast from Gulfport, Denton fled northwards as Katrina approached.

When he returned after the storm, he found that his home, a historic Cajun “shotgun” cottage, had been swept away.

His mother’s graceful ante-bellum mansion, a landmark on Biloxi’s beachfront for more than 150 years, had been flattened. One of the few comparatively undamaged houses in down-town Biloxi was the law office that Denton had inherited from his late father.

“My immediate fear was: I’m out of business,” Denton said last week. “But once I’d regrouped a bit, I realised the only certainty was the insurance companies were going to start cheating people as soon as they could.” Sure enough, policyholders began to complain that their claims were being rejected or only partially honoured. There have been reports of insurers claiming more in government subsidies than they were paying out to their policyholders. One local lawyer posted billboard advertisements denouncing “the three Ds of Big Insurance - Delay. Deceit. Deny”.

Many of the disputes centred on how much damage was done by wind - covered in most policies - and how much by water - often covered only if the victim had bought additional cover.

“It has been a very painful issue,” said Cochran. “For one side, the insurance companies, it is strictly business. For the other side it’s highly emotional. People have lost their homes, their lives.”

While most of the damage in New Orleans was inflicted by flooding after the levees broke - and was broadly covered by either private or government insurance - the cases in Mississippi proved more complicated. There were no eyewitnesses in the eye of the hurricane and no one could say with certainty whether a house had been blown away by 130mph winds (covered) or washed away by the storm surge (not covered by many policies).

Enter Senter, who in early rulings on a number of key cases managed to please both sides. He upheld the insurance industry’s right to exclude flood damage as specified by individual policies. But he also made clear that insurance companies could not refuse to pay up simply because hurricanes were accompanied by flooding.

It was up to the insurance companies, Senter effectively concluded, to prove that damage was by water and not wind - which everyone soon realised was impossible to establish in most cases.

The judge’s rulings have encouraged a rush to out-of-court settlements, much to the delight of McCoy, who arrived in court last Monday expecting to go to trial over his claim for $190,000 worth of damage. As a jury was being sworn in, the insurer backed down and an undisclosed settlement was agreed.

McCoy was represented by Denton, who is in no doubt that Senter’s handling of the crisis has promoted fairness and is encouraging settlements. There are still 649 cases officially pending in Senter’s court but the judge’s clerks expect all but a handful of those to be settled.

“I’ve never heard Senter play the trumpet,” Denton said last week. “Maybe when we’re done with all this litigation, we’ll get him to play.”

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