New storm: FEMA says trailers may be tainted

WASHINGTON - Pressed by an angry House committee, FEMA Administrator David Paulison promised yesterday to warn tens of thousands of displaced victims of Hurricane Katrina that they are living in agency trailers that may be contaminated with dangerously high levels of formaldehyde gas.

The noxious chemical has been linked to at least two deaths of FEMA trailer residents at a time when the agency ignored danger warnings from its own fieldworkers and instead delayed testing to avoid exposure to lawsuits, said Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D., Calif.), chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

The committee released internal e-mail messages showing the Federal Emergency Management Agency had known about the problem for more than a year but only this week committed to test a sampling of occupied trailers for dangerous levels of formaldehyde, having tested just one trailer more than a year ago.

The chemical is known to cause cancer and a host of other ailments ranging from nosebleeds to respiratory illnesses such as chronic bronchitis. Formaldehyde is used in glue and other building materials found in travel trailers and campers.

Upon hearing complaints from suffering trailer residents, FEMA workers on the Gulf Coast recommended testing for formaldehyde more than a year ago but were rebuffed by superiors.

"Do not initiate any testing until we give the OK," an agency attorney replied in an e-mail dated June 15, 2006. "Once you get results and should they indicate some problem, the clock is running on our duty to respond to them."

An agency memo dated the following day said the office of general counsel "has advised that we do not do testing, which would imply FEMA's ownership of this issue."

The 5,000 pages of e-mail and memos were released last week under threat of subpoena after FEMA initially had asserted lawyer-client privilege.

More than 76,000 travel trailers and manufactured homes are still occupied by Katrina victims. More than 100,000 families lived in FEMA trailers at some time and may have been exposed to formaldehyde during their stays.

Waxman accused FEMA of reacting to health complaints by trailer residents with "an official policy of premeditated ignorance" to avoid its "moral and legal responsibility."

"In hindsight, we could have moved faster," Paulison acknowledged. "We do now recognize that we have a problem."

Urged by the committee, Paulison said FEMA would notify all current occupants of its emergency housing about possible formaldehyde dangers and provide a list of symptoms indicating health concerns. He also said FEMA had asked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for help in assessing the dangers in occupied trailers.

More than a year ago, the agency did test one occupied trailer, because of the persistence of the pregnant mother of a 4-month-old child who lived there. The results showed formaldehyde levels 75 times higher than the maximum workplace exposure recommended by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

"The mother evacuated the trailer," Waxman said. "FEMA stopped testing occupied trailers."

Looking back, FEMA should have been testing occupied trailers much earlier, Paulison said.

"This agency made the best decisions it could with the information it had," he said. "We have not had this number of people living in travel trailers for this amount of time," so the agency did not know what to expect.

In April 2006, the Sierra Club tested 52 FEMA travel trailers on the Gulf Coast and found that 83 percent had formaldehyde levels above 0.1 parts per million - a level where emergency responders are warned about risks from one-time exposure.

Watch congressional testimony and see videos from New Orleans via http://go.philly.com/

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