© www.wbrz.comThe FEMA Tox Box
As soon as Nick Shapiro turned into the parking lot of the Tumbleweed Inn in Alexander, N.D., he recognized the trailers. They were off-white, boxy, almost cartoonish, and unadorned with any of the frills — racing stripes, awnings, window treatments — that a manufacturer would typically add to set a trailer apart on a display lot.
But these trailers had never seen a display lot. Shapiro had first seen them when he was living in New Orleans in 2010, doing fieldwork for his Oxford University PhD. In New Orleans, everyone knew what they were, and the city was desperate to get rid of them. They had been built fast, and not to last. The fact that some people were still living in them because they had never gotten enough money to rebuild their homes, or had run afoul of unethical contractors, was just an unwanted reminder of how far the city still had to go to recover from Hurricane Katrina.
But in the oil fields of Alexander, where Shapiro found them,
people had, at best, only a dim memory of hearing something bad about the trailers on the late night news.Only one person in the improvised trailer park near the Tumbleweed Inn knew where the trailers were from. Now 19, he'd lived in one as a child, after his family's home was destroyed when the levees around New Orleans broke in 2005. "It feels like home," he said, looking around the park. "Not the landscape. The trailers. I'm used to it."
Most of the people living in the trailer park were like him: men, young, drawn to North Dakota from all over the U.S. by the prospect of making $16-an-hour minimum in an oil boomtown. So what if they had to pay $1,200 a month to live in a trailer out on the prairie? They made it work. They slept in bunk beds, seven to a trailer, so that they could save as much as they could, and then get the hell out of there.
Comment: FEMA trailers were truly "disaster" housing! There was a
settlement for 55,000 residents of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Texas eligible for shares of $37.5M paid by more than two dozen manufacturers, plus $5.1M settlement with FEMA contractors that installed and maintained the units. The attorneys' fees and costs took $20.5 M and the plaintiffs were to receive about $4,020 each. [Perhaps someone in the government should have checked the math. The individual plaintiff share calculates to $401.80.] While juries in three trials sided with the companies and didn't award any damages, the above deal was finally brokered. Formaldehyde gas is considered a human carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, and a probable human carcinogen by the EPA. The taxpayer paid $2B for trailers that should have been scrapped as junk. Did anyone calculate the healthcare cost for this fiasco? FEMA trailers, apparently the gift that keeps on giving.
Comment: Lost Posture: Why some indigenous cultures may not have back pain