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She appeared smug and skulking through the entire debate, wouldn't even look at her competitors when they talked most the time, and her responses were generally shallow and disingenuous -- just the hollow words of a hollow politician. Government incompetence, mismanagement and intellectual paralysis in dealing with the aftermath of Katrina is a national ongoing disgrace. It seems FEMA is unable to learn from its errors.I'll be stocking up my emergency kit with real skepticism about how much help FEMA might be if my home gets the big one. It was like watching the calvary coming to the rescue.
I have been forced to draw the conclusion that this administration has shown in it's 2 major rebuilding projects that it is sadly lacking in leadership, communication and coordination. Although I give them an A in sales and marketing. I would love to hear the end result of this story. Is CNN working on interviewing government officials responsible/accountable for this obvious boondoggle. There's no question that it's evil and shameful..the real question is - what can we American citizens do about it? How can WE help get these people the trailers that they need and deserve...that have been paid for by their taxes and ours?
Browse Plans
Most sales have been successfully completed with the exception of three where the successful bidder defaulted on his contract. Two of the lots have been successfully reoffered for sale and FEMA has elected not to re-offer the units at the remaining site. Instead, FEMA has determined they are excess and are being offered for transfer to other federal activities or then to State Agencies for Surplus Property through the Federal Surplus Personal Property Donation Program. Paulison said the agency was on target to move everyone from the group sites by June 1 but was having “a lot of trouble” getting some of those displaced by Katrina to move again, even from cramped mobile homes that are often reduced to rubble in big storms.
“Then I said to the girl who was in charge of selling them, ‘You know this is illegal.'” The woman said that she didn’t know what Horine was talking about, but Horine noticed that the trailers were gone the next day. The seller refused, and promptly declared bankruptcy. Horine contacted the General Services Administration, the government agency that had handled the trailer auctions. Horine had bought hers from a reseller, for $6,000, while that reseller had bought it at auction for around $1,000. We recently completed the sales of the remaining significant inventory held by FEMA. At the end of January, the majority of the remaining units, a total of 101,802 units, were sold as 11 lots via GSA Auctions®.
THE KATRINA COTTAGES
The Corps of Engineers came out and inspected the location. The property has city utilities at the front with the capacity to handle the 50 to 60 trailers that could by placed under FEMA specifications. Local contractors are available for any installation work required. The Corps sent the report to the FEMA office in Baton Rouge. Or set up the Mobile Home city just north of New Orleans on vacant land. Seems like they don't want the people back in New Orleans.
The trailers can be used in Tornado Corridors - Earth Quakes and other natural disasters. Unbelievable, what a bunch of bureaucracy and poor planning. Every time I think I've heard the worst part of this story, something else comes along.
Clayton Mobile Home for Sale
“After the storm, about half of the people I knew were in FEMA trailers,” said Sierra Club organizer Becky Gillette. But I had a friend who would wake up in the middle of the night, gasping for air.” Gillette knew a fair amount about air pollution — she’d worked on social justice campaigns around the local oil refinery. The link between mobile homes and formaldehyde was well documented; the low ceilings and small size concentrated any fumes emanating from the particleboard they were built with.
Why did FEMA order them in the first place if they can't be used in areas where people need them? That's what I asked, but nobody seems to know. So the mobile homes sit there, immobile, 450 miles away from the Gulf Coast. The travel trailer prototype — made by Texas-based Frontier RV — is the first to have a device that circulates fresh outside air into the trailer, said Ryan Buras, a housing program specialist at FEMA. This one-bedroom trailer is also handicap-accessible with a bathroom three times larger than the typical travel trailer bathroom. THE KATRINA COTTAGE is a small, sturdy house that can be delivered at the cost of a FEMA trailer.
Friendship Velocity Dayton Park - 28 Deerwood Drive for Sale
I cannot fathom the hardships the people of the Gulf Coast face in trying to get their lives back together. Perhaps if the government had more people who took action instead of accusations, the people who truly need help would be able to get on with their lives. It is a shame that everyone needs someone to blame, and that officials cannot get past the red tape of who should be doing what. I think this just goes to show that FEMA really didn't have a plan when they ordered those mobile homes.
But instead the trailers were occupied by young men seeking their fortunes in the service economy that had sprung up around the oil and gas workers. Shapiro began to file public records requests to find out as much as he could about the trailers, and where they went. Now, when people contacted him, he had a collection of spreadsheets that he could search through to verify whether their trailer was one of the 120,000. Those who did try to get rid of the trailers, though, found that it wasn’t easy. Marty Horine of Clinton, Mo., bought a 32-foot ex-FEMA Gulfstream Cavalier for her son in 2007, two weeks before the trailers were officially declared unfit to live in.
Designer and author Marianne Cusato, residential designers Eric Moser and W.A. Lawrence, architect Bruce Tolar, and others designed this range of well thought-out, dignified, and permanent houses with strong neighborly character. To see more small house plans try our advanced floor plan search. I contacted the local FEMA office about letting them use 10+ acres next to my home.
As we do with all of our customer agencies, we provide full and complete descriptions, including known deficiencies, if such information is provided by the owning agency. However, many of them have been designated as "scrap" and until not too long ago were being sold as such. They seem to go on sale in batches, and the trailers in last batch were sold online by the government a short while ago as scrap. However, there is new batch of various FEMA Trailers, campers and mobile homes for sale and these DO NOT seem to be designated as scrap, but are simply being sold with a warning that they are manufactured with formaldehyde and have not been tested. Just know that prolonged exposure to formaldehyde is very deleterious to your health, and, that a recent federal court decision ruled that government is not immune from lawsuits related to this issue. Nonetheless, various brands of travel trailers/campers are being sold , including Gulfstream Cavalier, Coachmen Cascade, R-Vision Trail-Sport, Monaco Holiday Rambler,Forest River, Recreation by Design, Fleetwood Spec and Merit, Pilgrim Spec, Crossroads Zinger, Jayco and others.
A decade after Katrina had summoned the trailers into existence, the ill-fated homes might almost be safe to live in. There were no restrictions on continued use of the usable manufactured housing units because they were built to standards established by the Department of Housing and Urban Development , which are included in the Code of Federal Regulations . There are restrictions placed on manufactured housing units sold as scrap. Sure, in an ideal world, you wouldn't put prefab housing in an area prone to flooding, but housing in the NOLA area is a crisis. A temporary solution so that people can move back while their homes are being repaired or rebuilt is certainly better than nothing.
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