NEW ORLEANS (AP) — New Orleans clerk of court staff has been digging ankle-deep through mounds of landfill trash to salvage court records that the city erroneously discarded amid outrage from officials.

“This is unacceptable,” Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill said in a Wednesday statement. “I have questions. I’m going to ask the Clerk for an explanation of how this happened and just what records were dumped.”

In a statement, Clerk of Criminal District Court Darren Lombard blasted the city for an “egregious breach of responsibility and negligence” of public records. Photos shared by the criminal clerk of court’s office show city workers standing in debris beside an excavator and extracting tattered papers from heaps of garbage earlier this week.

Lombard said he was notified last Friday that containers housing official court documents had been relocated from trailers without his knowledge and, in at least one instance, destroyed. He blamed the Department of Public Works for moving the records and said he dispatched city employees to recover what they could.

“What they discovered was deeply disturbing: one entire container – filled with official Clerk records – had been dumped into a debris field and mixed with general trash,” Lombard said. “Documents were strewn across the yard, caught in the wind, and scattered beyond the secured perimeter.”

Lombard said the records had been stored outside the clerk’s office, in trailers and containers, because of the “longstanding absence of a secure, dedicated Clerk of Court storage facility” dating back to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Flooding from the collapse of the city’s levee system led to the destruction of thousands of criminal case files.

Lombard, who took office in 2022, said he has repeatedly requested funding for a secure storage facility.

The court records, many dating back to the 1950s through the 1970s, included capital murder and aggravated rape cases, Lombard told Nola.com.

Lombard said he has called for a city investigation.

Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s office did not immediately respond to request for comment.

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Brook is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.