FEMA redux

Arkansas Business, Feb 25, 2008

THE FEDERAL EMERGENCY Management Agency under the Bush administration will go down as one of the most incompetent in American history.

Gov. Mike Beebe, who had offered some praise for the federal agency's response after the Feb. 5 tornadoes, last week said the government embarrassed itself by purchasing mobile homes now found to have high levels of formaldehyde.

He was hitting the agency with a wet noodle when it deserved a hard slap.

The latest in a long string of fiascos, which makes us wonder if incompetence was the agency's double-secret mission, deals with sending some of those 6,351 trailers still parked at the Hope airport to provide emergency shelter to those whose homes were destroyed by the tornadoes.

About the time FEMA decided to do that, it was also announcing, along with the Centers for Disease Control, that recent tests found high levels of formaldehyde in trailers being used in Louisiana and Mississippi after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit the Gulf Coast in 2005. Some have been claiming the trailers made them ill almost from the beginning.

It's just the latest in the story of the trailers--one of the federal government's costliest stumbles after Hurricane Katrina.

FEMA went out and bought 145,000 trailers and mobile homes, spending $2.7 billion, mostly through no-bid contracts--and never considered that many areas wouldn't allow them or that there was no way to provide electricity to them or ... we could go on and on. Some 39,000 people are still living in those temporary trailers in Louisiana and Mississippi more than two years after Hurricane Katrina. More thousands sit unused at Hope and other sites.

High levels of the carcinogen formaldehyde have been found in about a third of the trailers FEMA provided, causing breathing problems. To its credit, FEMA officials said they're immediately relocating anyone in a trailer who voices health concerns. Its goal is to move everyone in trailers into more permanent housing by year's end.

We're still critical of FEMA not only for its all-around incompetence but because it has been so slow to respond to obvious health concerns for so long. FEMA has known of the problem for well over a year, maybe longer.

And that situation leaves plenty of questions.

Where did all these trailers come from? Is the formaldehyde found in those of a particular manufacturer? Why isn't that company being prosecuted? In what percentage of the trailers is the high level of formaldehyde being found? Why has it taken so long to resolve this mess? Have the trailers remaining at Hope been tested? Surely someone, in addition to FEMA, should be held responsible for the fiasco.

"I don't know how you buy trailers that are unsafe or how you let them stay in that situation, but I do think quick and decisive testing ought to be done and appropriate precautions taken, and then if they're safe, get them distributed as quickly as possible," Beebe said. And said well.