Obama administration to tackle housing for disaster victims
In the aftermath of Hurrican Katrina, we all learned a sobering fact: The government wasn’t nimble enough to find adequate housing for the many, many victims of this storm whose homes were destroyed.
Incoming president Barack Obama hopes to change this.
Janet Napolitano, Obama’s pick for secretary of homeland security, has plans to create a long-term plan for providing housing to disaster victims.
A recent Associated Press story recounts a conversation between Sen. Mary Landrieu, a Democrat from Louisiana who saw her state pummeled by deadly hurricanes in 2005, and Napolitano. During the conversation, the two spoke about the need for the government to have a strong, workable plan to provide housing for residents who lose their properties during disasters. Louisiana in 2005 pointed out clearly that the federal government had no such plan — at lest not one that worked — in place.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency — an agency whose reputation plummeted following the Katrina disaster — in July created its own draft plan. That plan, though, did little more than leave the specifics to the next presidential administration to figure. Landrieu, in the Associated Press story, criticizes the draft as a “strategy without a plan.”
How bad was the government’s plan following Katrina? As the Associated Press story points out, thousands of Katrina victims were placed in trailers that later were found to have had high levels of formaldehyde. Prolonged exposure to this can result in breathing problems. There is evidence that it can also cause cancer. According to news reports, residents of the trailers FEMA provided reported frequent headaches, nosebleeds and other medical problems.
The government’s new draft strategy says that the government can only house disaster victims in trailers as a last resort. Only the head of FEMA can approve the use of the trailers. Disaster victims would be allowed to stay in the trailers for a maximum of six months.
I hope I’m not the only embarrassed that the government is even considering using trailers again. Shouldn’t our country be able to do better for disaster victims? The way the Bush Administration handled Katrina and its aftermath was a disgrace, and was reason enough for Pres. Bush to get booted out of office. Hopefully Obama and his team can do better. It’s hard to trust politicians. (Believe me, I’m from Illinois, where we can’t stop arresting our governors.) But we can all hope that government officials have learned their lessons following Katrina.
