AP: The super duper poison trailer update edition
Source: Associated Press
Lots of talking about our favorite subject, FEMA trailers, this week. Here's you big fat update.
From the AP, we learn that the CDC was aware a year ago about health dangers to Gulf Coast victims still living in the FEMA trailers but chose to ignore warnings from their scientists:
Christopher De Rosa, who until recently was one of the government's top toxicologists, told a congressional panel that he repeatedly raised concerns early last year that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was not adequately informing the public of the hazard, even as symptoms of dangerous exposure were surfacing.
As a result, tens of thousands of families displaced by hurricanes Katrina and Rita remained in the trailers without full knowledge of the risks, he said.
"I stated that such clinical signs were a 'harbinger of a pending public health catastrophe,'" De Rosa said in written testimony, quoting one series of e-mails he wrote to superiors last summer. "I stressed the importance of alerting the trailer residents to the potential reproductive, developmental and carcinogenic effects ... (but) the only response I received was that such matters should not be discussed in e-mails since they might be 'misinterpreted.'"
De Rosa's comments came Tuesday at a House Science and Technology subcommittee hearing on how the CDC and its sister agencies handled complaints about trailers issued by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Three of the trailers to be used for Arkansas tornado victims have formaldehyde levels even higher than the ones used for Katrina victims:
The Federal Emergency Management Agency test results, obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press, show about half of the mobile homes tested have formaldehyde levels higher than the average home. Three of the 32 mobile homes tested from among the thousands stored at the Hope Municipal Airport have levels high enough to put possible residents at an increased risk of cancer and respiratory illnesses.
Officials in Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee are discussing whether they should set a uniform standard of what an acceptable level of formaldehyde in emergency housing should be. However, that could prove impossible as FEMA already ordered all victims of hurricanes Katrina and Rita to move out of the homes, regardless of the formaldehyde level.
The CDC has announced a new study to study the long term effects of exposure to formaldehyde. I think this is the part where we are supposed to see the silver lining to this whole mess:
Accused of taking months to correct a misleading report about the possible health risks of formaldehyde in FEMA trailers, a government agency announced Tuesday a five-year study of Gulf Coast children to determine the long-term effects of exposure to the fumes.
"I regret that our initial work on formaldehyde in trailers did not meet our own expectations," said Howard Frumkin, director of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, part of the Centers for Disease Control.
Oh and hey - FEMA just missed the second deadline for producing a plan to house the victims of the next disaster. They apparently are still working on it:
The congressionally mandated report was supposed to be finished last June. Criticized for the delay, a top FEMA official promised at a hearing last month that it would be ready by April 1. It is now unclear when it will be done.
The overdue housing report is the latest in a string of busted deadlines that had been imposed by Congress in landmark disaster legislation passed in 2006. The law was designed to remake the nation's disaster response and prevent a repeat of the mistakes exposed by Hurricane Katrina.
But see this is the New FEMA, the friendly FEMA, the committed FEMA. Really, they promise:
Drawing on White House, congressional and other governmental reviews, "New FEMA," as they call it, is better prepared to respond to a disaster than at any time in the agency's 29-year history, they say.
Maybe the problem is that they're just too busy planning to build a wall around the country to worry about disasters over at Homeland Security. It's just so much easier to deal with perceived problems then real ones. Poor FEMA; they just need more time.
And they wonder why no one trusts a word they say anymore.
