Posted on 11/02/2006 9:20:04 AM PST by Responsibility2nd
Note to Hurricane Rita survivors: Please don't beat up the FEMA trailers, use them as meth labs or cart them off to your deer lease during hunting season.
More than 1,200 of the one-bedroom travel trailers issued to people displaced by Rita have been torn up so badly that serious repairs have been necessary, according to a statement Tuesday from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
"They're certainly not for long-term living, and we at FEMA better understand that better than anybody," said Don Jacks, an agency spokesman in Austin.
4,600 trailers issued
In Texas, more than 4,600 of the one-bedroom trailers were issued free of charge to those made homeless by the Category 3 hurricane when it hit Sabine Pass on Sept. 24, 2005.
Today, about 3,000 of the trailers — which cost federal taxpayers $20,000 each — remain in use in Texas. So far, about 1,200 have suffered so much vandalism they had to be sent to FEMA repair centers in Texas and Arkansas, Jacks said.
One trailer had more than 300 cigarette burns. Another was burned to the ground. Hundreds of others have torn cushions, broken doors, torn-up refrigerators and myriad problems.
Used as drug labs
Then there's the illegal use issue.
Some of the trailers issued to Hurricane Rita and Katrina evacuees have been used as drug labs. One Texas man trucked his to Louisiana and sold it. A few other tenants have hooked them up to vehicles and even taken their trailers to deer leases to have a place to stay while hunting.
"They are rare instances," Jacks said of the hunters. "You shake your head and wonder, 'What are they thinking?'"
Jacks said residents need to understand that vandalizing or removing the trailers could violate their written agreements with FEMA.
That said, only five Rita victims have been removed from trailers for violating those agreements, according to FEMA.
Forget it. They will bitch that the free trailer was cheap and not good enough for their sorry asses and will demand a new one and get it.
Looks like cheap, cheap construction. Tears up easily. Folks don't generally live in trailers like these for more than a few days/weeks at a time, but these folks were LIVING in them for months and months. I can believe that they have been damaged quite a bit.
Lean against one of those walls, and you'll put a hole through it. Open a cabinet door too aggressively, and the thing breaks off.
There's a difference between good, durable construction and cheap construction. The cheap stuff is cheap for a reason.
Your complaint is with bureaucracy in general and its inevitable inefficiencies whether public or private. If you are really a government shrinker you should be complaining about the very existence of FEMA, period.
According to the article, only one trailer is known to have been sold, and that one was trucked to Louisiana for sale. In other words, it was put to its intended purpose, to provide housing in an area where much of the original housing stock had been rendered uninhabitable by the hurricane. Probably for some family that had been languishing on a waiting list for months for a FEMA trailer that FEMA had said they were entitled to but couldn't seem to get delivered (there are STILL people waiting on those lists). Whatever the seller did with the money, it can't be worse than what the FEMA f--k-ups are doing with many millions more of our money. I simply can't get worked up about it.
Attempts to make rational use of FEMA resources keep running into interference from FEMA, and that I CAN get worked up about. A few months back, a news report interviewed the mayor of some little Louisiana town, who was trying to get FEMA to move a trailer from the property of a family who didn't need theirs any more to the nearby property of a family which desperately needed it and been getting empty promises from FEMA for months about how they were going to get a trailer. FEMA dweeb told the mayor they'd get to it when they could; mayor told FEMA dweeb he'd just arrange to have it moved himself becuase they'd been waiting for months already; FEMA dweeb told the mayor he'd better not do that because he'd be committing a crime and FEMA would go after him for it (mayor moved it anyway, figuring FEMA would have as much trouble getting around to charging him with a crime as it had getting trailers moved to where they're needed, and a good deal more trouble getting any court to convict him).
Animals
I wish they'd sell me one and let me fix it up and put it on a bit of land...I wouldn't even mind if it was (somewhat) trashed.
Where's the widescreen plasma? Now wonder they tossed these trailers.
What tax refunds? Gotta pay taxes to get a refund.
To be fair the government bout "recreational grade" trailers meant for supporting a few people a few weeks a year, and had them living in them non stop for years at a time.
I'm not defending the "tenants".. but typical travel trailer like the ones the government bought are not meant to support full time living by a family.
Govliquidation.com
You'd be good at it!
Thanks for the link.
I'd shut it down in a second if I could. But for the time being, the infernal thing exists, and the more demonstrations there are of how utterly incompetent it is at managing resources, the sooner it will get its budget clipped and hopefully be on the way to eventual oblivion.
The sale of the trailer that was trucked to Louisiana begs the question of why there are still people in Louisiana willing to shell out money for these rickety trailers, when most people who have no better place to live are entitled to get one free from FEMA. And while FEMA has thousands of the trailers unused and self-destructing in soggy fields in the middle of nowhere, and is emitting a laundry list of lame excuses for why the trailers aren't going to people made homeless by the hurricane, a FEMA trailer recipient in Texas who no longer needs his demonstrates the technique: Find somebody who wants one, and haul the thing over to them. Maybe the buyer wanted it for recreational purposes rather than as a primary residence, but so what? If there's actually a market in Louisiana for cash sales of flimsy FEMA trailers for recreational purposes, why isn't FEMA finding those people and selling them the trailers that are currently being left to self-destruct?
"Didja forget The Earned Income Subsidy?"
Well, that's not really a "refund," and it only applies to low-income WORKERS. I doubt that the vast majority of the trailer-trashers would qualify as, in the words of the IRS, wage-earners.
The only "work" that many of them do is in putting a good buzz on.
Since these are the same type of trailers that have literally self-destructed while sitting in fields unused (according to FEMA, at least), I wonder how much active "trashing" was involved in rendering these occupied trailers in need of repair.
Where can I pull up my truck for a free FEMA trailer?
I want in on my tax $$ at work.
Does FEMA pay for the registration? I could use that as well. And the Butane Tanks....they're free as well?
Please send the address and contact info and available models and mfgs to choose.
There are huge fields full of them, supposedly warped and unuseable from being on an unstable surface for so long. FEMA says they'll all have to be discarded. Personally, I think any trailer that can warp that easily should be easy to warp back into the right shape. Rent a truck with a tow-bar, find one of these fields of trailers, and take one. FEMA will never know it's missing. If they actually track you and the trailer down and complain, send them a bill for removal of the "unuseable" trailer.
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