What do you do with FEMA trailers laden with the known carcinogen formaldehyde?
Why you send them to Arizona for copper miners to live in.
From Leonard Pitts:
It seems the Federal Emergency Management Agency refused, on the advice of its lawyers, to test whether the trailers it provided for hurricane evacuees contained unsafe levels of formaldehyde. According to documents released by Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, when FEMA staffers urged the agency to respond to reports of formaldehyde in the trailers, they received an e-mail from a FEMA lawyer that said, "Do not initiate any testing until we give the OK. Once you get results, the clock is running on our duty to respond to them." In other words, if we discover that the more than 120,000 trailers and mobile homes we have provided to families along the Gulf Coast are reeking with a toxic gas, we'll be obligated to replace them. So it's better if we don't know.
Which raises a few moral questions of its own:
Is it moral to let women breathe a gas that may cause respiratory illness in order to save money?
Is it moral to leave men in conditions that may cause raw throats and burning eyes so as to avoid responsibility?
Is it moral to expose children to a compound believed to cause cancer if it helps cover one's backside?
Apparently, for FEMA, the answers are yes, yes and yes. Which fits with jigsaw snugness the mindset of an administration that frequently chooses to refuse acceptance of knowledge that challenges its preconceptions. It also points up with piercing clarity the hypocrisy of that same administration's frequent claims of fealty to the divine.
The copper mining boom towns of Arizona have a severe shortage of housing. So what's a mining company to do?
From the Arizona Republic, July 12, 2007:
One copper company, Phelps Dodge, has been forced to buy up hundreds of so-called Katrina trailers from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to house workers for its mines in Morenci and Safford.
...
So the company has transformed an unused Clifton park into a makeshift village of about 60 surplus FEMA trailers where employees can live for free. More trailers have been moved into nearly every vacant RV space from Clifton to York Valley to Safford.
Do you think the MSM will cover this? Dream on!