Katrina mobile homes immobile in Arkansas

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I've lived in New Orleans 13 years now, a Yankee who got sucked in by the smell of gardenias in February and couldn't pull away.

My house is in the part of New Orleans we've started to call the "sliver by the river," the narrow strip along the Mississippi that didn't flood. So I'm typing this from the study of my 100-year-old home, with its hardwood floors and high ceilings, feeling lucky and guilty and numb.

The failure of the levees wiped-out 217,000 homes in New Orleans. Tens of thousands of people are desperate for any kind of temporary housing that will allow them to stay here while they rip the moldy sheetrock out of their homes and try to start over. But there's little housing available.

Apartment rents have doubled, FEMA-paid hotel rooms are being phased-out, and FEMA trailers are in short supply. Then this past week, I saw -- like an oasis in the desert -- 11,000 FEMA mobile homes, real homes, 3-bedroom, 2-bath beauties (comparatively speaking) -- sitting in an Arkansas cow pasture.

FEMA says these mobile homes aren't allowed in a flood plain, which pretty much rules out most of southeast Louisiana. Why did FEMA order them in the first place if they can't be used in areas where people need them? That's what I asked, but nobody seems to know. So the mobile homes sit there, immobile, 450 miles away from the Gulf Coast.
Posted By Susan Roesgen, CNN Correspondent: 1:31 PM ET

http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/anderson.cooper.360/blog/2006/02/katrina-mobile-homes-immobile-in.html

I meant to put this article in the Katrina forum.

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Thousands of mobile homes collected to provide temporary homes for victims of Hurricane Katrina still sit unused at the Hope Airport -- and it's been a year since the storm ravaged the Gulf Coast and left thousands of people homeless.
Peter Smith of New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward now lives at Texarkana. He says it's a crying shame for so many people to be displaced and not have a place to stay, especially when the mobile homes at Hope sit vacant.


He said many New Orleans residents hadn't returned to the city simply because they have nowhere to live.

The trailers, plus travel trailers recently added to the collection, were intended by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to be shipped to the Gulf Coast for use by storm victims. The agency said various restrictions on where the trailers could be placed stalled deployment, including a prohibition on placing them in flood plains. Some were sent to northeastern Arkansas to aid tornado victims last spring.

(Copyright 2006 by The Associated Press. All Rights

http://www.kthv.com/news/katrina/story.aspx?storyid=33370

My first post was from Anderson Cooper's blog in February 2006, and it's almost September, and still, the trailers sit un occupied.

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about the fully equipped trailers in Arkansas sitting there waiting for a tragedy to happen in another area, while the residents of the lower 9th ward of New Orleans had to be displaced. And someone said race and class doesn't matter.

That's a bunch of crap.

[Doofus1]

CNN reported this nearly 6 months ago.

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CNN reported this nearly 6 months ago.

CNN also reported it again a few days ago. Six months have passed and the fully equipped trailers are still not occupied by the residents of New Orleans. The trailers are sitting in Arkansas waiting for the right people who have a tragedy.

[Doofus1]

Who are the "right" people?

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Who are the "right" people?

out of me, but obviously, the trailers are not for the people of the 9th ward in New Orleans.