FEMA trailer travesty

An AP report said yesterday that Gulf Coast residents are still having problems getting temporary housing nearly a year after Katrina:

It has been 11 months since Hurricane Katrina hit and Janice Tambrella still does not have a home. She doesn't even have a trailer of her own.

Tambrella is currently jammed in with 10 other relatives in a single trailer delivered to a luckier relative. Sleeping on the floor, living out of cars surrounded by overgrown grass and storm-felled trees, she sighs, "I need a place to stay."

Nearly 1,200 St. Bernard Parish families are still waiting to get into trailers that sit locked on their home sites but need utilities or other services; another 400 families waiting for trailers have none at all, FEMA said.

Meanwhile, nearly 10,000 FEMA trailers, which cost taxpayers nearly $1 billion, still sit in a muddy field in Arkansas deteriorating. But there are unused trailers right there in Louisiana, according to the AP report:

Meanwhile, other people in the parish and region say they're having trouble getting rid of trailers they no longer need.

Kathie Acosta lived in a trailer while fixing up a house that got 2 feet of water. Now, she can't seem to get it taken away. She keeps refusing inspections and covering the FEMA identification numbers, hoping the government will confiscate it.

"They keep calling and want to inspect propane lines, and I say, 'No. Don't come on my property. Take it away,'" Acosta said.

Walker said it takes time to remove trailers because the same workers setting them up are the ones taking them away. He said workers can't simply haul an unused trailer to another site.

But in some cases, Rodriguez is doing just that, even though it's illegal. When warned by a FEMA official that he could get in trouble, the blunt, profanity-prone leader challenged the agency to jail him.

Obviously, taxpayers aren't throwing enough money at the problem:

Four no-bid contracts awarded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to house Hurricane Katrina evacuees have ballooned in value from $400 million to about $3.4 billion, prompting renewed scrutiny from Congress and federal auditors about the disaster agency's management of the aftermath of the storm.

The Department of Homeland Security's inspector general is, for at least a second time, reviewing the contracts with construction and engineering firms Bechtel Corp., CH2M Hill Inc., Fluor Corp. and the Shaw Group Inc. to provide 150,000 trailers for hurricane victims, even as FEMA expects to competitively award at least $1 billion for similar work in future contingencies within days.

Heckuva a job there, FEMA!