jackson weather: 55f (13c)

home > Noise

FEMA Wants Immunity for Poison Trailers

by Adam Lynch
July 23, 2008

The Federal Emergency Management Agency asked U.S. District Judge Kurt Engelhardt for immunity from lawsuits over what plaintiffs' lawyers and the Sierra Club called “hazardous levels” of formaldehyde in government-issued trailers. Engelhardt is presiding over a lawsuit against FEMA. Plaintiffs claim the government knew about the dangerous toxicity of plywood used in trailer construction but continued to allow hurricane victims to inhabit the structures, despite independent toxicology tests revealing five times the tolerable amount of formaldehyde in the structures.

Becky Gillette, director of the Formaldehyde Campaign division of the Sierra Club, said the government has no right to duck responsibility after years of ignoring the warnings.

“The government should bear responsibility for harming these people. We tried to tell them early on that these trailers were testing positive for formaldehyde and it took them nearly two years before they even acknowledged a problem,” Gillette said. “That’s two years that tens of thousands of families were exposed to excess levels of formaldehyde.”

FEMA's public relations office in Washington had not yet issued a statement regarding its request.

FEMA trailer residents began complaining of headaches, bleeding sinuses, and dying pets almost immediately after the federal government distributed the trailers in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The Mississippi Chapter Sierra Club financed tests in 2006, finding 30 of 32 FEMA trailers registering unsafe formaldehyde levels. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency also conducted tests revealing high levels of formaldehyde in 2006, though FEMA claimed it didn’t know how to interpret those results. The agency only acknowledged high levels of the contaminant in 2008, two years after the Sierra Club had first submitted to them its initial results.

“It’s outrageous that the government wants to bear no responsibility,” Gillette said. “It becomes landlord to 100,000 people, puts them in unsafe dwellings and then refuses for years to acknowledge a problem—it dares to try to say, ‘it’s not our fault.Ҕ

Engelhardt had not rendered a decision on the motion on Wednesday.

 
posted by ladd on 07/23/08 at 01:15 PM. [printer version]    Share |

COMMENTS

 

You are not logged-in. To post a comment, you must be a registered user and logged in. Click here to register or click here to login.

:: recentcomments
Nov 20, 2009 | 06:37 PM
[Editor's Note] Love Thy Neighbor
Izzy: it's not enough to just study something - at some point you have to act. Systematic exclusion can be read as hatred, even when those involved in it do not feel it to be that. This is ...
Nov 20, 2009 | 06:37 PM
[Editor's Note] Love Thy Neighbor
J.T.: Wintrhop, your last sentence "I don't want a small and manageable God. I prefer one that I can't fully understand." bears out that we each have perceptions of God. And, when the ...
Nov 20, 2009 | 06:03 PM
[Editor's Note] Love Thy Neighbor
Wintrhop Sargent: Funny you should mention the gender issue of a deity. I was at lunch with a St. Andrews priest one time and a very conservative member of the Cathedral came to our table ...
Nov 20, 2009 | 05:37 PM
[Editor's Note] Love Thy Neighbor
Izzy: I wouldn't be too sure your church doesn't preach hate if your liturgy is not gender-inclusive. Think about it - is God really a "He" or a "Father"? Those are some images or visions of ...
Nov 20, 2009 | 03:35 PM
Barbour Wants to Merge State's Black Universities
baquan2000: Goldenae - you pointed out a key element in your post, "the point is that he would even suggest such a thing. And the sad part is that from the polls, the people ...
Nov 20, 2009 | 03:15 PM
[Doyle] From Dixie, With Love
amoderatemississippian : check out the following link: http://www.oxfordeag le.com/news2.html It does appear, by the article written today, that possibly a sizeable portion of the student body ...
Nov 20, 2009 | 02:55 PM
[Editor's Note] Love Thy Neighbor
Wintrhop Sargent: WMartin - At the church I attend, St. Andrew's Cathedral, there is no teaching or preaching about hate (unless you include the teaching and preaching AGAINST hate). I'm ...
Nov 20, 2009 | 02:10 PM
[Doyle] From Dixie, With Love
ladd: A fail-safe principle I've always sworn by: If the Kluckers agree with me about something, I need to rethink it.
Nov 20, 2009 | 01:39 PM
[Doyle] From Dixie, With Love
Goldenae: I would truly be ashamed of myself if I looked at life and others the way the some people do. Some folks can not put themselves in another person's shoes to save their lives. It is ...
Nov 20, 2009 | 01:27 PM
Barbour Wants to Merge State's Black Universities
Goldenae: Why is it so hard to understand that regardless of what we would like to think, there are different standards. That is quite obvious in Barbour's suggestion of ...
 


view "flip" version of this week's issue

 

Guests online: 85
Logged-in members: 1
Anonymous members: 0
Elapsed time: 1.1579
The most number of visitors ever was 920 at once on 04/28/2009
currently online: kaust

 

© Jackson Free Press, Inc. - portions of code by CC with EE.
phone: 601-362-6121 (ext 11 sales, ext 16 editorial, ext 17 publisher)
fax: 601-510-9019 * P.O. Box 5067 * Jackson, MS * 39296