Politics: FEMA Trailer Outrage

The direct consequences of the Katrina disaster continue to play out in the lives of hundreds of American children, with health problems that will dog them for the rest of their days.

Remember the tens of thousands of plain white RV trailers ordered up by FEMA as temporary shelter for evacuees? Remember how anyone who believed there was something wrong with those trailers -- something that may have killed one man and seemed to be making children sick -- was dismissed for a time as a conspiracy theorist? 

According to a story today by the Associated Press: 

. . . [T]ens of thousands of youngsters . . . may face lifelong health problems because the temporary housing provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency contained formaldehyde fumes up to five times the safe level.

For the record, other stories have put the number at up to 75 times the safe level.

Formaldehyde is a probable carcinogen. The children now are suffering from severe asthma, but experts fear that within 10-15 years, they will begin seeing cancers in these kids.

What's particularly disgusting about all this is the foot-dragging and cover-up that have gone on on the part of the government. According to emails that surfaced through a class-action lawsuit, FEMA knew of the health problems way back in 2006 but took no action -- not because they were lazy or ineffectual, but because they were callously neglectful:

On June 16, 2006, three months after reports of the hazards surfaced and a month after a trailer resident sued the agency, a FEMA logistics expert wrote that the agency's Office of General Counsel "has advised that we do not do testing, which would imply FEMA's ownership of this issue." A FEMA lawyer, Patrick Preston, wrote on June 15:  "Do not initiate any testing until we give the O.K.  . . . Once you get results and should they indicate some problem, the clock is running on our duty to respond to them." (Washington Post, July 19, 2007)

Once testing was conducted, it was rather baffling in its particulars: 

A CDC study released May 8 examined records of 144 Mississippi children, some of whom lived in trailers and others who did not. But the study was confined to children who had at least one doctor's visit for respiratory illness before Katrina. It was largely inconclusive, finding children who went to doctors before the 2005 storm were still visiting them two years after. (AP, May 28, 2008)

Efforts to expedite the removal of these families from the toxic trailers only began in earnest this February.

Fourteen trailer manufacturers have been named in the lawsuit. The suit alleges that the manufacturers -- contracted by the government to produce 100,000 trailers ASAP -- may have cut corners. Formaldehyde is used in composite wood and plywood panels. Typically, during the manufacturing process the materials are baked and the formaldehyde is sealed in. At least one expert has suggested that perhaps this part of the process was truncated during the manufacture of these trailers, which, according to the lawsuit, sometimes were built in ten minutes flat.

What do the manufacturers have to say? According to MSNBC, a spokesperson for the Recreational Vehicle Industry Association . . . .

 . . . [A]knowledged that the high heat and humidity in the Gulf Coast could increase the rate of formaldehyde "outgassing" from wood products trailers, but added that ventilation should quickly take care of any problem.

"You can get it to dissipate very easily if you just ventilate it," he said. "People may just need to be shown how to open the windows."

Yes, of course. We all know about those sub-human Gulf Coasters, not bright enough to crack a window when they're being choked by formaldehyde fumes.

As I sit and type this, a colorful string of Mardi Gras beads hangs here in my office just an arm's length away. It takes me back to a couple of days I spent in a FEMA trailer with a beautiful family who had lost everything and who were struggling to continue on with dignity. They were very brave, but occasionally the emotion broke through and they had to stop and regain their composure. They had chosen to stay on there in the trailer parked in front of their semi-gutted house, which had been flooded with nine feet of water. They were toiling away at stripping down their house to rebuild it. All the vegetation in the back yard had died, and they were burning out a tree stump. Their eight-year-old son, who whipped off his shoes and tromped around barefoot whenever he slipped out of sight of his mother, was fascinated by the burning stump, and spent hours "tending" it. After two days of hearing their story and getting to know them, my photographer and I pulled away in our rental car. In my rearview mirror I saw the barefoot boy running in the road behind us, motioning for me to stop. He came up to our windows and handed each of us a string of beads as a memento. We thanked him and continued on our way. In my rearview mirror I could see him standing in the road, barefoot, waving us off, as we turned off his street and continued past many more miles of devastation.