Toxic Trailers Redux: When Did FEMA Know?
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Buzbee and the residents who spoke to Mother Jones all believe those late 2005 tests should have raised an immediate alarm—yet no one alerted residents to the potential danger until an entire year later. This spring, residents had a chance to talk to FEMA officials about their concerns, at one of several government-sponsored "Public Availability Sessions" across the state.
I went to one such talk earlier this year, held in Louisiana's largest FEMA trailer park, built in the aftermath of Katrina. The park, called Renaissance Village, sits in Baker, Louisiana, just northeast of Baton Rouge. The talk promised residents free food, bottled water, and a chance to be among the first evacuees to have their questions answered by experts from both FEMA and the CDC soon after CDC test results were announced. Yet if residents were upset or distressed when they arrived at this first meeting in Baker, most left the meeting downright angry, like one Renaissance Village trailer resident, Lena, who did not want to give her last name. "It's all a string-along," she said that day. "It's a bunch of nothingness. Just words to keep you going, and thinking that help is coming, making you think that the government cares."
At the Renaissance Village meeting, residents and people like attorney Buzbee had a barrage of burning questions for the government officials. How many trailers in Renaissance Village had been tested? Michael McGeehin, representing the CDC, was unable to provide an exact count. Residents protested that they did not know a single person who had had the tests done. McGeehin responded that the trailers were chosen in a scientific manner across the state. When residents then berated him chorus-style, "that is not good enough; it is not good enough," McGeehin bluntly responded, "YES it is. YES it is."
While McGeehin was the one before the gathered crowd facing repeated questions about the test results, he was quick to deflect them to FEMA every time residents asked why their trailer wasn't tested in his study. He repeatedly pointed to a row of seated officials at computers who worked for FEMA, saying FEMA has said "that anyone who wants their trailer tested can have their trailer tested."
Lena, who has lived with her two sons in Renaissance Village since October 2005, did as instructed and took a seat before a FEMA official, asking if her family's trailer could be tested. The response from Jennifer, who later identified herself as a FEMA "supervisor" but refused to give her last name, was mechanical: "That's a CDC question, Ma'am." When I intervened over Lena's shoulder, my press pass flashing and my microphone pointed at the FEMA official, and told her that CDC is directing residents to her FEMA staff because it is FEMA who will now be doing follow up testing, she glanced quickly at me, then at Lena, and then reversed her position, saying, "We can do that." However, when Lena asked how long the process would take, Jennifer responded, "I don't have any information on that."
Over the next 20 minutes, I watched while Lena was bounced between officials who treated her with alternating condescension—as when Lena expressed a deep fear of not being able to "make it" given the exorbitant prices of rentals in New Orleans, and one responded, "If you think you're going to fail, what's going to happen? Think positive, you know, I've always told my kids…"—and contempt, as when Lena asked the supervisor to help her because she felt she was getting nowhere and was abruptly told, "That's what we have case workers for."
Among the various supervisors, FEMA caseworkers, and FEMA press officials at the Renaissance Village meeting, no one could definitively answer whether or not FEMA was going to test more trailers for formaldehyde. That day, it seemed the best FEMA was offering residents concerned about their health was a motel room. And while a new space may seem like a good first step, many residents fear it's a quick and simple path to homelessness. Fear of losing the only stable homes people have, even if they are potentially toxic, means that many residents won't even start a case with FEMA. Stories abound among residents of neighbors and friends at Renaissance Village who have been moved first out of their trailer, and then, one month later, out of a FEMA-funded motel room, cast starkly on their own.
To Lena, the situation is simple. "I believe that people who have case workers are scared. They are being made to believe that they have a place, but they really are not stable and they are not going to have stability unless something that is concrete, that's well grounded or well rooted happens. For me, I'm afraid. How do I step out when there are so many lies? The government [is] not giving the employees the answers for us, because I believe there is no answer for us. They just hope that we probably all drop dead like flies."
Research support for this article was provided by the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute.
Photo: Sacajawea Hall
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/02/katrina_cottage_1.php
That's something that might actually help! Nillying about with lawsuits helps no one
This is the biggest bunch of CRAP i have ever heard of.!!! I bought a trailer a few years ago, and there were stickers all over it. This sounds like a way for the LAZY people to get some free money..!!!
Americans are getting a little tired of the LAZY Katrina people, thinking that since they got flooded out, we americans owe them LIFE LONG payments and shelter. When the water subsided, many friends and aquantences started to ask, "If our house was flooded, my wife would DEMAND that i get my ass back and clean it up so the kids can have a place to live..!!!".. But i guess that the people of Katrina don't care how there kids live and go to school, since so many of them are not back yet.!!! The people down there, who are not back yet, are not willing to help themselves, and want FREE EVERYTHING.!!! Or is it that non of them have husbands to push to clean anything up..?
OH, and by the way, cigaretts have chemicals in them, and you see all these lazy people in trailers SMOKING...
What say you.?
Bill
To wit: Who MADE these trailers? They actively threaten human health. That HAS to be a contract violation. WHY isn't FEMA complaining about that party, or taking measures to put the blame on THEM for putting FEMA in a fix?
FEMA couldn't have bought the trailers in the first place, unless someone made them, right? So who's making trailers that could make people sick? And why aren't the people who do such things for government money being called out by FEMA or the media?
All I can think, is that this is another gravy contract for some Bush funding corporation or other. Why else would they never pass on the blame for the fiasco? I'd dearly love to know. My own hunch is that's it's a Halliburton subsidiary.
Shouldn't the Justice Department be going after these guys? Shouldn't FEMA be posturing about what a victim the agency was, to get such goods; when they're trying so hard- (sorry, had to stop laughing) to do their best for victims of disasters?
I've wondered about this ever since I heard about the formaldehyde in the first place; waiting for the lapdog press to take up the issue.
Sign me, "Still Waiting"
There is not cover up. I am friends with one of the manufactures, and there have ALWAYS been chemicals in construction. You must not have ever purchased anything that had chemicals in it i guess, (now i am trying not to laugh). The chemical contents are in such SMALL amounts, and they put stickers up to tell you. It is kind of like when you go pump gas, didn't you know that you were being poisened, and that is why there are stickers on the gas pump..?
Is this to reasonable and logical for you to understand...? Maybe you shuold start to think that these people are trying to get even MORE out of the taxpayers..?
Bill