March 16, 2010
By Eugene Robinson
Washington Post

The Obama administration is making a big health-care mistake. I'm not talking about the final push for comprehensive reform legislation, which is righteous and necessary. I mean the sale of more than 100,000 contaminated trailers and mobile homes -- a move that could make people sick.

Photo: Bryan Morehead sits in the shade outside his FEMA trailer in a temporary community in Greensburg, Kan. Tuesday, July 24, 2007, after Morehead's home was destroyed by a tornado on May 4. Three months after the F5 twister killed 10 people and flattened more than 90 percent of Greensburg, a destruction so thorough that experts warn it could be a half-decade or more before the community fully returns, some locals are wrestling with whether to come back. (AP / Charlie Riedel)

The trailers are a legacy of the Bush administration's botched response to Hurricane Katrina. They were purchased by the Federal Emergency Management Agency as temporary housing for displaced Gulf Coast residents, but some people who moved into them reported burning eyes, irritated throats, headaches and nosebleeds.

The Sierra Club began testing the air in some of the trailers in 2006 and found unusually high levels of formaldehyde. The government delayed almost two years, as reports of illness mounted, before declaring in 2008 that all those living in the trailers should move out.

Additional testing by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and FEMA found that, on average, formaldehyde levels inside the trailers were five times higher than expected for indoor air. "Long-term exposure to levels in this range can be linked to an increased risk of cancer, and as levels rise above this range, there can also be a risk of respiratory illness," a CDC statement said. Formaldehyde is particularly dangerous for people with asthma or bronchitis.

The government did its testing in December and January, months when levels of the toxic chemical would be at their lowest. Warmer temperatures -- such as those common in the Gulf Coast area most of the year -- make the levels rise significantly.

In January, FEMA agreed to sell 93,000 trailers and 9,300 mobile homes -- virtually all the units it still owns -- for pennies on the dollar. The purchasers are wholesalers who plan to resell the mobile dwellings, and each unit will bear a sticker warning that it is for occasional use only, not residential use. The theory is that limited, episodic exposure to the formaldehyde -- as would be experienced by someone who used a trailer as a storage container, say, or as a seasonal hunting lodge -- is safer than continuous exposure from living, eating and sleeping inside.

Still, the federal government is selling housing units that it knows are unsafe to live in. For an administration that claims to believe in consumer protection, this is no way to show the love.

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