Post-katrina: Toxic trailers

More than two years after hurricanes Katrina and Rita ripped through the Gulf Coast, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is still messing things up for those left homeless by the storms. It took FEMA 19 months to even deal with the fact that the trailers it had provided to hurricane survivors were contaminated with formaldehyde fumes.

Three months ago, the agency said it would start testing the 56,000 trailers housing families for toxic fumes, which can cause cancer and respiratory illness, among other health issues.

The agency's administrator said the first phase of the tests would finally start in July, when internal FEMA e-mails revealed that the problems were known, and that the agency's lawyers discouraged the tests. Keep in mind that at this point, they knew that at least two people had died as a result of exposure to the fumes.

But The New York Times reports that a single trailer is yet to be tested since then.

Which means that, all told, those living in the trailer from the get-go have been exposed to harmful fumes for 22 months. They're poor, so who cares, right?

Besides, it's not as though they have anywhere else to go, and a contaminated port in the storm is better than nothing. So what if more than 4,000 people living in the trailers had to be relocated because of health concerns? The important thing is that they say that testing will begin at the end of this month.

And, like, this time, they totally mean it.