The Daily Background
| Worried about liability, FEMA ignored indications Katrina trailers were unsafe
by Arlen Parsa
Well, this is certainly atrocious:
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has suppressed warnings from its own Gulf coast field workers since the middle of 2006 about suspected health problems that may be linked to elevated levels of formaldehyde gas released in FEMA-provided trailers, lawmakers said today.
At a hearing this morning of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, investigators released internal e-mails indicating that FEMA lawyers rejected environmental testing out of fear that the agency would then become legally liable if health problems emerged among as many as 120,000 families displaced by Hurricane Katrina who lived in trailers.
[…]
“FEMA’s reaction to the problem was deliberately stunted to bolster the agency’s litigation position,” [Republican Rep Thomas] Davis said. The documents “make it appear FEMA’s primary concerns were legal liability and public relations, not human health and safety.”
Other key facts: when the Sierra Club did its own independent tests of 32 trailers back in May (since FEMA was purposefully not conducting tests for fear that they might be liable for the results), they found that 30 of the trailers, or 93% contained “unsafe levels of formaldehyde.” Actually that’s not entirely true: FEMA did conduct one test.
Writes the Washington Post (linked above), “The committee reported that FEMA has tested only one occupied trailer, in March 2006, finding formaldehyde levels 75 times higher than the maximum workplace exposure level recommended by NIOSH. But without further testing, FEMA issued a statement that May saying, ‘We are confident that there is no ongoing risk.’” Clearly Michael Brown was not FEMA’s only problem.
