Sale of tainted trailers brings backlash on FEMA
FEMA officials "are shoveling the whole thing under the carpet to make it go away," said Scott E. Pepperman, executive director of the National Association of State Agencies for Surplus Property. For the future, FEMA has set tight formaldehyde limits on new trailers it buys and overhauled disaster contracts to strengthen quality control.
FEMA officials defended the sale, noting that Congress has complained that the government has spent $220 million over three years to store vacant units. Wholesale buyers from the auction must sign contracts attesting that trailers will not be used, sold or advertised as housing, they said, and that trailers will carry a sticker saying, "Not to be used for housing."
The agency rushed production of the trailers, with few safety specifications. Then, over nearly two years, FEMA officials suppressed internal warnings that there were health problems among 300,000 trailer occupants -- what lawmakers later called an "official policy of premeditated ignorance" -- before declaring that trailers should be abandoned in early 2008.
"What if Toyota ordered a recall, then simply put a sticker on its vehicles saying they were unfit to drive before reselling them?" said Becky Gillette, a spokeswoman for the Sierra Club in Mississippi, which helped uncover the formaldehyde problem. "There's a double standard for the government."
The decision to sell them in bulk, critics said, will glut an already depressed market and keep them from being sold to individuals or donated to public agencies who could use them for storage or office space. It was also a bad business deal, some said, benefiting middlemen rather than the government.
Consumer advocates and environmentalists are outraged that the government resold products it deemed unsafe to live in, saying warning stickers attached to the units will not keep people from misusing them.
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