Recovered FEMA supplies reach Louisiana

Last month, Facing South reported on the CNN investigation that revealed $85 million in household goods and supplies earmarked for Gulf Coast hurricane survivors were given away to unaffected areas of the country.

The CNN investigation uncovered that 121 truckloads of household goods, including basic kitchen supplies, were marked as surplus property by FEMA and given away to state agencies and 16 states after sitting in a federal warehouse in Texas for two years. This was done despite the fact that community groups and survivors from the Gulf Coast were still in desperate need of such supplies.

Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu began working with the state agencies and FEMA to recoup the supplies and send them to hurricane affected areas in Louisiana. The Advertiser reports that the states of Texas and Arkansas have returned what they received of the surplus goods and the U.S. Postal Service has said it will return their supplies as well. The first round of recovered supplies, from Texas, went to UNITY in New Orleans and the second round of supplies, from Arkansas, went to the Acadiana Outreach Center in Lafayette, La.

"[FEMA] has proven to be, time and again, deaf to the immediate needs on the ground in the aftermath and long-term recovery from a major disaster," Sen. Landrieu said in a press release this week. "I am planning a joint hearing for later this month of my Disaster Recovery Subcommittee and the House Homeland Security Committee to get to the bottom of how FEMA's communications chain could again fail the Gulf Coast so tremendously."

Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, will be working with Sen. Landrieu on the hearing. "We just think that FEMA needs to come and tell the committee how such a debacle could occur, and in the process, what are they going to do to assure Congress and the taxpaying public that it will never happen again," Rep. Thompson told CNN.