LESSONS NOT LEARNED (taken from the New York Times)

By JACQUELINE PALANK
Published: July 20, 2007
WASHINGTON, July 19 — The chairman of the House oversight committee on Thursday accused the Federal Emergency Management Agency of refusing to acknowledge high levels of formaldehyde in trailers it provided to hurricane evacuees on the Gulf Coast.

In testimony on Thursday, three people who had lived in the trailers said they believed that exposure to formaldehyde, which is found in many building materials, was the cause of health problems including sore throats, burning eyes and respiratory problems .

The administrator of FEMA, R. David Paulison, told the subcommittee he was not “100 percent sure that it was the trailers” that caused residents’ health problems. But Mr. Paulison also said that, in hindsight, the agency could have moved faster when problems were reported in some of the more than 120,000 mobile homes and travel trailers provided to evacuees.

“We were not formaldehyde experts,” he said. “We recognize now that we have an issue. We are dealing with it in the best manner we can.”

The chairman of the oversight committee, Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, said 5,000 pages of documents released Thursday revealed a battle between the FEMA field staff and officials at the agency’s headquarters.

“They wanted to ignore the problem,” Mr. Waxman said, referring to headquarters officials. “What we have is indifference to the suffering of people who are already suffering because of Hurricane Katrina, and this is from an agency that’s supposed to serve the public.”

Mr. Waxman said that after news reports in March 2006 about formaldehyde in the trailers, members of the field staff urged immediate action. He quoted a response in an e-mail message from a FEMA lawyer who said: “Do not initiate any testing until we give the O.K. Once you get results, the clock is running on our duty to respond to them.”

The documents include an e-mail exchange among agency staff members dated June 27, 2006, relating the news that one person had been found dead in a trailer in St. Tammany Parish, La.

Referring to the use of air-conditioning, one e-mail message said: “We do not have autopsy results yet, but he had apparently told his neighbor in the past that he was afraid to use his A.C. because he thought it would make the formaldehyde worse.”

The staff member who wrote it recommended further investigation and said that the agency’s office of general counsel had told a different employee that it “has not wanted FEMA to test to determine if formaldehyde levels are in fact unsafe.”

Mary DeVany, an industrial hygienist with her own practice, testified that it is not rare to find formaldehyde in homes, because it is used in pressed wood products like particleboard and plywood, and in glues and certain insulation materials. Ms. DeVany said several agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, had classified the chemical as a probable or known human carcinogen.

Paul Stewart of Bay St. Louis, Miss., who lived in a FEMA travel trailer from December 2005 to March 2006, said the agency was unresponsive to calls about his suspicion that the trailer was making him ill, so he ordered a test kit and determined that formaldehyde levels were high.

When Mr. Stewart reported the results to the agency and asked for a new trailer, he said, “The way FEMA treated us was as if we were charity cases.” He added, “To them, it was like you were asking for something better.”

Lindsay Huckabee of Kiln, Miss., said that after moving into a FEMA mobile home in December 2005, she, her husband and four children began to experience symptoms that she now believes were related to formaldehyde exposure. Visits to doctors became a common occurrence. Ms. Huckabee, who was pregnant when she moved in, said she experienced preterm labor for three weeks that had to be stopped with medication. Even then, her son was born four weeks early.

Mr. Paulison said the agency received its first complaint of formaldehyde fumes in March 2006, six months after the trailers were first delivered. He said that “after a prompt review,” officials replaced the trailer listed in the complaint on March 19. He said 58 of the 66,800 travel trailer and mobile homes now in use had been replaced because of formaldehyde concerns and that as a result of five other complaints, residents were moved to rental housing.

On the eve of the hearing, the agency announced it that it had asked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to test air quality in occupied trailers. The study will begin next week.

Mr. Paulison said FEMA had updated its trailer purchase specifications, improved training of the agency and medical staff members who must respond to complaints and increased efforts to move residents into other long-term housing.

Representative Mark Souder, Republican of Indiana, which is home to many mobile home manufacturers, expressed concern that the hearing was portraying the industry unfairly.

“What we have are terrible personal stories,” Mr. Souder said. “To just uniformly, without research, make the assertions that I’ve been hearing today about an industry is irresponsible.”