Another reason to fume at FEMA

FEMA has done it again. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has told its employees not to enter stored travel trailers. It is concerned with exposing workers to dangerous fumes. But that ban does not extend to the thousands of hurricane victims displaced from their homes and now living in FEMA trailers in Louisiana and Mississippi. Heckuva job, guys - again.

FEMA's reasoning is that stored and sealed travel trailers offer no opportunity for the chemical at issue, formaldehyde, to escape. Formaldehyde can cause difficulty breathing and is classified as a carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, an arm of the World Health Organization. The federal Department of Health and Human Services warns that formaldehyde, which emits as gas from the manufactured wood used in new mobile homes, "may reasonably be anticipated to be a carcinogen." Given what we know, why is the government gambling with the health of people who have nowhere to turn?

FEMA says it has warned every tenant across the Gulf Coast and offered to move anyone into alternate housing. But 52,000 trailers are occupied. Of the 4,600 households that complained since July, fewer than half have been moved or offered housing elsewhere. The 2,500 still waiting, FEMA said, "are being actively case managed."

We're all for case management, but how about getting on the ball? Why are 52,000 households still living in trailers? Why has FEMA ceased the sale and deployment of these trailers even as it now downplays the health concerns? Why has it not completed tests of the sealed trailers and when will it resume testing air in the occupied ones? Yet again, it looks inept and overwhelmed.

[Last modified November 9, 2007, 22:23:20]