Katrina Incompetence Redux: FEMA Trailers
Last month, at Congressional hearings, we learned that "top FEMA officials had brushed aside field workers' concerns about formaldehyde despite residents' complaints about possibly related illnesses." Internal memos and e-mails showed that Agency lawyers resisted testing because they didn't want to be accountable. One lawyer said: "Do not initiate any testing until we give the OK. ... Once you get results ... the clock is running on our duty to respond to them."
Want to lay odds that those lawyers were political appointees rather than civil service employees?
Earlier this month, FEMA committed to testing the trailers. Although FEMA says it doesn't know how many trailers it has sold to Katrina victims, it is now offering to buy-back trailers sold to inhabitants within the past 12 months. And there are another 56,000 FEMA-owned trailers, mostly in Louisiana and Mississippi, still being used by dislocated families.
The Sierra Club tested 44 FEMA trailers:
[They] found formaldehyde concentrations as high as 0.34 parts per million -– a level nearly equal to what a professional embalmer would be exposed to on the job, according to one study of the chemical’s workplace effects.
All but four of the trailers it tested registered higher than the 0.1 parts per million that the EPA considers to be an “elevated level” capable of causing watery eyes, burning in the eyes and throat, nausea, and respiratory distress in some people.
The General Services Administration has sold about 40,000 used trailers via its website; FEMA said these would not be part of the buy-back but did not explain the rationale for splitting this hair.
There is a class-action lawsuit against 14 manufacturers of about 120,000 FEMA trailers, alleging that they violated regulated formaldehyde levels. Formaldehyde is a human carcinogen.
This isn't the first problem with FEMA trailers. Last year we learned that the same key opened 1 in 50 trailers. FEMA provided about 150,000 travel trailers and mobile homes for victims of Hurricane Katrina; last August about 120,000 were still in service.