People are still living in FEMA's toxic trailers

[Music] take a drive through the back roads of rural america you're bound to pass any number of boxy white trailers these unremarkable 250 square foot homes are part of the forgotten legacy of hurricane katrina minimum wage where i come from in indianapolis is 7.25 an hour minimum wage here is roughly 14 to 15 an hour even working as a cashier at walmart you're going to earn 16 17 18 an hour so do you hear like the issues at all i'm sorry can you hear the formaldehyde i would love to know if the place where i'm living is poisonous ten years ago hurricanes katrina and rita tore into the gulf coast and displaced over a million people in response the federal emergency management agency deployed over 120 000 trailers to the region [Music] after katrina it was pandemonium people were clamoring for these trailers there were protests about how slow they were getting deployed and people wanted a place to live there were so many bare necessities there were problems that the fema trailers having some sort of strange air to them was just one of many things that were going on [Music] when people first moved in they experienced symptoms such as eye irritation headaches and nosebleeds and as time progressed health effects worsened some people suffered ailments including spikes in asthma rashes chronic diarrhea and cognitive decline as the scale of exposure became apparent a class action lawsuit was launched and by 2007 fema was aggressively taking back the trailers and the court mandated that fema keep these trailers as evidence and that court order expired on january 1st 2010 so that's the date when they were able to cut their losses they were spending tens of millions of dollars a year to maintain the lots they took the first opportunity to sell them on the open market so they were sold in giant auctions they were sold very cheap often in large lots [Music] this research has taken me to over a dozen states people have emailed and called me from every corner of the country and many of them weren't even sure whether or not they had a fema trailer so i would run their vin numbers through a list of every trailer fema sold everyone thought the formaldehyde levels of these trailers would have gone down much quicker than they did fema the trailer industry resellers but six seven years after katrina i was testing trailers all over the country and i found levels were still quite high and people were still getting sick florida north carolina louisiana louisiana every week i was getting emails or phone calls from very concerned people north dakota louisiana tennessee up here in pennsylvania virginia north dakota again i just purchased the camper here in the bakken housing is all but impossible to find my daughter who is sick has been hospitalized numerous times with breathing problems and was even ambulanced out before because of respiratory problems many of the trailers gravitated to foreclosure hot spots 2010 was the peak of the foreclosure crisis they went to pockets of rural poverty all over the country including native american reservations with chronic housing shortages [Music] but nowhere seemed to attract these trailers like north dakota their oil boom was taking off just as the economy was tanking and people were flocking to the state for work demand for housing grew exponentially it was more expensive than manhattan so here we are at the tumbleweed inn which comes highly recommended i'm just gonna drop off our well here we have some pima trailers right here we've got a a park model um this is the gulfstream cavalier which is the most uh high the highest production unit of the fema trailers we've got one two of those uh another fema trailer here looks like we have about seven over there um we're about two minutes into our adventure and we've already found basically a fema trailer park we've got another one here this is a park unit another park unit behind there another uh travel trailer fema travel trailer back there you can identify them by the make and model uh and i can end by the vin number which will run all the vin numbers in a second um but most of all you can just see them by being the the plainest um least branding no um garnishes like these swooping lines or mountains um these two are gulf stream cavaliers oh here's another one so there's three down here that one has a busted window looks like people are home and most of them we'll drop off our gear and say hi and when i came in my hair i was like man this is like back at home not the scenery but like back at home with trailers you know back at home just more money so i just kind of i'm used to it i'm used to it were you surprised when you saw me like hey i know these trailers yeah i was i was like dang i just came from this trailer i'm like back in it huh they got mowed right here mold right here mold right here it's not meant for weather nobody wants to live with this who wants to live with that not the people around here that's working heard that there's a job out here so i was like hell yeah i'm down to go like 16 an hour for cash register that ain't nothing yeah that's cool yeah you'll never find that out in california it's a little overpriced but it's whatever yeah how much is it like 12 something a month wow yeah it's pretty the oil field you know a lot of they're making money so they make everybody pay how many of you are here there's about seven people some people here yeah well two right there two right here bunk bed and me right there the federal government built it for people displaced by the hurricane when their home got destroyed by the hurricane yeah and they built it and then they found out they were toxic and then they sold them all over the country that's the best way to get rid of a toxic thing you know just to sell it around the country they had a sticker in the window saying not to be used as housing and then uh i'm here yeah now i'm here like huh that's awesome but i think actually since don't have a window here you're getting good clean air in there yeah people that have that like sealed up with these tables like it's getting bottled up in there so actually there's a there's fema trailers down there yeah there's at least two or three yeah it's pretty tight in there it's not really i mean nobody likes being here i i don't like being in these traders this is like not actually cool at all yeah there are like three more in there like three and then plus me and my dad this is not that we want to live like want to you know live like this like all tied up and stuff like that but that's what the whole plan of this is all together we actually end up paying just like 100 bucks each wow which saves us a lot of money [Music] so one of the reasons why we knocked on your door in particular is that this looks like it's uh a former fema trailer so a trailer that was made by the federal government um in 2005 or 2006 for people in the gulf coast um after hurricanes katrina and rita um that's pretty that's pretty interesting because the guy who sold us that is exactly that year 2005. well we can look up the vin number and see if it was from there would you be interested in we could try i really wouldn't know we exactly wouldn't know where it is sure i'll show you sure here it is right right there it sounds fairly legible so since it was potentially made by the federal government you can just ask the federal government for records because it's public public records of all the vin numbers so i'm just going to search and see it's taking forever because there's 150 000 of these they're scrolling through yeah so let's just take it so this is actually okay the same vin number so this is the same trailer so this trailer 2006 recreation by design travel trailer and it was sold in a lot of 21 715 similar trailers for henderson auctions there's a big auction house in louisiana oh and that's who it was sold to so it must have been sold by the federal government to this auctioneer the auctioneer sold it to someone who sold it to the guy your dad bought it though oh okay okay yeah uh yeah originally this was going to be a summer job for me i decided to keep staying because i did not save any of my money so what i'll be doing is i'm pulling formaldehyde at a known rate through this tube that i'm going to bring on the score and then break off the tips and there's a chemical in there that reacts with the formaldehyde in a known way so i'll pull it for half an hour hopefully the results are not worrisome they're not too bad they're not you know incredible uh it's about 20 parts per billion um which is what's what's the dangers of it can you put any [Laughter] uh so a lot of the trailers i was testing uh back in 2011 2012 were hitting like upwards of 100 100 parts per billion okay and so this is 20 so it's about a fifth of that and a lot of these units in particular were hitting about 100 so it's about five times better than it was and it's maybe around double a normal home right now um every home that's built has formaldehyde in it so it's part of something we live with all the time okay um so we know what levels are really really bad and what should be avoided in occupational settings when it comes to domestic exposure that's over a very long period of time and for at a relatively low level the effects aren't as well known so the agency for toxic substances and disease registry which is a sister agency of cdc uh which you may have heard of um they say that below eight parts per billion for long term like over a year exposure you don't have to worry about negative health effects so but over a you could have effects they haven't necessarily found harm happening at nine parts per billion or ten parts per billion but they have to be a little extra careful in protecting the population by saying below eight you'll definitely be safe i'm living at 20 parts per billion is there anything i should be looking out for or at least a downgraded version of the symptom anywhere in the future uh yeah if you did have um like slowing thinking like if you're hypocognition so like thinking more slowly issues with your respiratory tract sort of like a simmering low qual like low grade sinus infection if you have asthma increased asthma attacks um but the thing also is that some people are going to react and some people aren't so it's not just a matter of when it's going to happen to you it could just be that it's not going to happen we thought that we'd find some trailers but we had no idea that we'd find them in basically in post-katrina concentrations um there's one out back of the restaurant we're at now there's a two minutes down the road there's a trailer park with at least 20 20 to 30. they're really every single little cluster of trailers we've seen at least one has been a fema trailer we also thought we'd find oil and gas men living in these trailers but instead it's been almost exclusively really young men working on the fringes of the boom in the service industry [Music] we're on our way to meet with delvin cree on trust land of the turtle mountain reservation about three hours northeast of the bakken shale i've been trying to get in touch with delvin for at least three years because he's the most outspoken person about the hazards native americans have endured living in these trailers [Music] i think we got like 800 to 850 by these camper trailers and we were getting them until i raised a concern about the toxic mold in them and the formaldehyde levels and i tried did stop getting them because of that i think that's why the government gave us these these camper trailers because we can dispose of them disposable on their own lands so but in essence they're disposing of them by giving them to you yep a lot of these campers are going out to the bakken oil fields and they were being sold and that was a concern of mine also each camper that i seen in mississippi had them stickers on them that you couldn't live in them that they were temporary housing and when they got up here all the stickers were gone were you aware that it was a fema unit when you when you purchased it i kind of thought it was but they weren't being advertised as being that you know i mean it was great now i bought and i got my money invested in a house and the house is making me sick you know sometimes you know it was just you were having a runny nose for no apparent reason you know whether it was an allergy or whether it was it almost felt like you had a cold coming on but it never manifested itself as a cold you know sleepless nights uh toss and turn toss and turn that's gotten a lot better now i mean a lot of times i'll sleep six seven hours straight through you know uh obviously when it was 40 parts per billion it was affecting me but now it's 30 parts per billion i'm not noticing any real problems and but who's to say maybe even at 30 parts per billion that could cost somebody else health concerns we can't say that greg's house is safe the level is still higher than what i would want to live in it's also certainly several times higher than the cancer risk level so even if he's feeling better on a day-to-day level he may have some latent toxicity that could affect us health in the future so the toxicity that greg is dealing with now is no longer the extraordinary toxicity that was relegated to those kinds of homes but the everyday sort of toxicity that we all have to deal with since all our homes are held together with these same materials if you're an unskilled or slightly skilled worker and you can make over a hundred thousand dollars a year you're probably capable of putting yourself through a lot to make it all make sense to you but for the people we've been talking to who have mostly been service industry folks where they're making maybe ten dollars an hour more than they would they're also paying higher rent than they would living in worse conditions than they would more isolated than they would is it really worth it at the end of the [Music] day [Music] [Applause] you

Channel: Grist

Views: 3,042,724

Keywords: FEMA, katrina, rita, hurricanes, Natural Disaster (Literature Subject), Formaldehyde (Chemical Compound)

Id: rtj6o-cBHQE

Length: 19min 8sec (1148 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 27 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/Girion47]

Wouldn't the formaldehyde have all volatilized at this point? Most wood and new furniture has it in it, but it goes away over time, faster in warmer climates. I could see the initial move in be pretty bad for exposure, but years later?

[u/Chapos_beltloops]

So I used to build these back in 2007 in nappanee Indiana. Roughly 50 a day with two lines running 100 a day. Completed units. I installed the interior walls after they left flooring. Before they put the linoleum on the floors they would run a grinder over all the staple heads so it would not poke through the linoleum.

They would then hit all of the shavings / sawdust with a air blower and breathing that stuff in made me sick as fuck. Gave me the only sinus infection I've ever had in my life.

Normal wood wouldn't be that bad but none of this wood had time to dry/sit in the kiln properly. It was literally still wet when we installed it. when driving a screw through it green liquid would come up out of the wood.

Sidenote. The shady owners there would run an extra two units a day using the materials that FEMA had sent and sell them to dealers Basically for pure profit.

[u/kabooseknuckle]

Why are people still living in FEMA trailers?

[u/[deleted]]

Pretty much all industrial lumber uses a formaldehyde resin. The mill I worked in had a thick haze of saw dust and formaldehyde for the industrial press to make the boards.

[u/762NATOtotheface]

I have two of these on my hunt lease. Being in Ga, they have been baked plenty.

[u/tedistkrieg]

When I interned and later worked at the Coroners Office, we had barrels of Formaldehyde that we used to fill up smaller containers to dilute it. One time, the pump (that pumps out the solution from barrel into smaller container) broke while I was filling it up AND the small container cracked, it started spilling Formaldehyde everywhere, and it's hard to describe but the way I was holding the smaller container, I couldn't just place it down. So I had to hold this thing while Formaldehyde was spilling all around while coworkers started cleaning it up.

It was brutal, my lungs burned, my eyes burned, I couldn't breath. Legit felt like dying. Being around that stuff sucks hard.

[u/stelfox]

The problem originally was that the trailers were manufactured and then immediately shipped out without a normal off gassing period due to emergency needs. Then the homes were shipped wrapped in plastic. The people who were injured by fumes only removed enough to open the door. Not good that their homes were filled with poison gas but it could have been mitigated by the user and well it's probably still better than a tent if you leave the windows open.

[u/Nolon]

I haven't watched the video yet I'm just giving an opinion

When you're poor you're poor. That's just how it goes. My grandmother lived in the dilapidated trailer. As well as both of my grandfathers. Except that the one grandfather didn't live in a trailer just this dilapidated old place that in Louisiana people have these buildings that they build on the levees and such. That they call camps. He has his moved to his land. But yeah that place is a mess. Though sometimes it's just how you live. My grandmother she cleaned hotels and took side work. None of them had money. They seemed to be happy. As best I recall growing up. Living within their means

[u/13lueChicken]

Meh. I have some internet points to burn.

I’ve moved plenty of times with just my wife and I working minimum wage jobs with student loan payments for degrees that never worked out for us. And not by borrowing. Literally rented a uhaul, saved up for deposits, and moved it all by myself. I say “myself” because only one of us could afford to take the day off to move. Working at a subway and a flower shop, both of us with fairly serious mental disorders. I don’t understand people who think they can’t move. Outside of physically disabled people of course. But dude in the thumbnail looks entirely capable of bettering his and his family’s life and he just isn’t. It’s not like moving to a non-poisoned trailer park is too luxurious. People will live in a poisoned handout is the only moral to this story. Oh, and government housing is shit. But I feel like we all already knew that.