BAKER, La. -- Ten weeks after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, leaving hundreds of thousands of people homeless, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has delivered just 15 percent of the travel trailers and mobile homes that it purchased for temporary housing.
The beleaguered agency ordered 125,000 travel trailers and mobile homes as part of an ambitious effort to quickly provide housing for the estimated 600,000 people who were displaced by Katrina and Hurricane Rita, which ripped through east Texas and western Louisiana three weeks later.
As of last week, however, FEMA had installed 18,834 travel trailers in Louisiana and Mississippi and another 494 mobile homes. Thousands of others sit in four staging areas scattered throughout the Gulf Coast region.
FEMA's trailer program, estimated to cost well over $2 billion, is one aspect of the federal government's halting response to those left homeless by the powerful hurricanes.
The government's primary housing plan is to offer rental assistance to evacuees so they can move into more permanent housing; to date, 488,000 Gulf Coast evacuees have received rental assistance.
But many evacuees didn't want to relocate, and Louisiana and Mississippi have encouraged them to stay in their home states.
With few vacant apartments and homes left on the Gulf Coast, FEMA trailers have become a much-desired commodity.
FEMA is filling an average of 500 trailers a day, placing them either in newly constructed trailer parks, parking them in existing trailer parks or, whenever possible, placing them on driveways or front yards so evacuees can work on their damaged homes.
Even at that rate, thousands of people remain waiting in relatives' homes, idling in hotel rooms (FEMA is still paying for 69,000 hotel rooms) or, in the worst case, scraping by in shelters, tents or severely damaged homes.
`Horrible' experience
"My experience has been horrible," said Vanessa Posey, 44, who lives with her seven children in a tent in the front yard of her mother's home in East Biloxi, Miss., using a camp stove for heat and the back yard as a toilet. She said FEMA promised her a mobile home a few days after the storm. On Wednesday, she got two travel trailers instead, neither of which had electricity.
"I'm still over at the tent until I can get some power," Posey said Friday, as she tried to persuade the local power company to connect her trailers. "Every time I call the FEMA number that they gave me, I get disconnected. I don't know what to say. I know one thing, I'm disgusted, and I'm full-blown depressed."
