‘Scrap’ FEMA mobile homes return as housing

[babylonsister]

‘Scrap’ FEMA mobile homes return as housing

Units sold at auction turn up in residential parks in Georgia and Missouri


Approximately 20,000 mobile homes and travel trailers owned by the Federal Emergency Management Agency are arrayed at the Hope Municipal Airport near Hope, Ark., on March 2, 2007.
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Danny Johnston / AP file

By Mike Brunker
Projects Team editor


As FEMA ponders whether to resume public sales of thousands of surplus travel trailers and mobile homes that once housed Gulf Coast hurricane victims, at least one purchaser has figured out a way around the suspension: Buying “scrap” units not intended for human habitation and then returning them to the housing pool.

And there are indications that he wasn’t the only one using the dodge before the agency moved to halt the practice.

The hurried purchase of tens of thousands of travel trailers and mobile homes after the twin disasters of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005 has been a headache almost from the start for the Federal Emergency Management Agency. That’s because many of the units also triggered headaches — and far worse — for the hurricane victims they were intended to shelter because they contained high levels of the airborne form of the industrial chemical formaldehyde.
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That problem is at the center of a massive lawsuit expected to go to trial later this year, as nearly 40,000 plaintiffs seek damages from manufacturers of the units, four companies that installed them and the federal government. It also prompted FEMA to suspend sales of the travel trailers and mobile homes to the public in July 2007.

But now FEMA is finding that even getting rid of decommissioned travel trailers and mobile homes can be complicated.

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http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29510684/

[catzies]

1. What a waste. n/t