Some Perspective
Scout at First Draft reports on the Anderson Cooper New Orleans piece and the inclusion of a segment on trailers that were trashed: “FEMA officials say nearly 10 percent of them came back unfit to use again.”
Back in August of 2005 I did a post on trailers:
FEMA brought in 1500 travel trailers to be used for housing after hurricane Ivan last Fall. The local NPR station reports that 900 of those trailers were damaged by hurricane Dennis including 200 listed as destroyed.
FEMA refused to allow the trailers to be moved for protection. People weren’t looking for any help moving them, they just wanted permission to move them at their own expense. FEMA’s refusal cost the government over 13% of its trailers locally.
The report also doesn’t mention the loss of trailers at FEMA’s storage site in Arkansas, because they were improperly protected for storage. Those trailers were brand new and never used.
2 comments
What foolishness by the FEMA fools. I learned in my 12 years as a trailer owner that many people who have never lived in or owned a trailer have not one clue how they differ from conventional fixed-location housing. Apparently “many people” includes “all FEMA officials.” If you want a trailer to be “unfit to use again,” there’s no surer way than to forbid the trailer’s removal from the path of a major storm. Fools, I tell you; we’re “governed” by fools.
The people behind the request were all contractors who had access to the vehicles that could have moved the trailers off the barrier island and inland to a building site until the storm went by. It would have cost the tax payers zip, but would have saved the people in the trailers the hassle of removing all their stuff or risk losing it.
The problem in Arkansas was that they bought some right off the assembly line and never checked them when they put them in storage. Some of them had open windows, and other simple things that should have been remedied, but no one checked.