FEMA boneyards near New Orleans, ready to move in again?

[caption id="attachment_10987" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Metairie FEMA trailers"][/caption]

NEW ORLEANS - Judith Martin - If you had been one of the thousands of people who spent months and years in a FEMA trailer park after being evacuated from flooded areas of southeast Louisiana in post-Katrina 2005, you would understand why I think my story is important.



I became very anxious yesterday afternoon while driving eastbound on Interstate Highway 12, on the North Shore of Lake Pontchartrain.  Let me tell you why.

I lived in a FEMA trailer, first in Elm Grove Village from 2005 to 2007, and in front of my own house for most of 2007. I never wanted to see any one of those monstrosities ever again, for many reasons, far too numerous to recite in a simple article.  Suffice to say, they were tight, crowded, hot, ugly and every other description of the worst you can imagine.

But there, yesterday afternoon, along the west-bound roadside, and stretching back almost to the horizon, were fields full of used FEMA trailers, all of the sort shown in the picture. The location was even more peculiar, because it originally had been a sales lot for luxury trailers and motor coaches. The luxury products seemed to have been moved to another sales lot further to the east, while the FEMA trailers occupied the lot I came upon
first.

When the trailer parks around Baton Rouge began to be dismantled, as was Elm Grove Village in 2007, it was said that the trailers
were all going to be sold for scrap and crunched up for the aluminum that could be salvaged from them. Remember, these trailers are the ones that had been the basis of the lawsuits about toxic chemicals leaking from the glue and materials used in building them, and making evacuees sick.

It was known to all the trailer park residents that the used trailers were being stockpiled in "boneyards" around Atlanta, Georgia in particular. There were boneyards further out in the country around Baton Rouge. I had actually seen such trailers being transported on Interstate 10, from New Orleans back up to Baton Rouge. But this was the first time I had seen a boneyard in so close to New Orleans, which was only about a 24 mile drive across the Causeway, give or take a few miles, due south.

Evidently, the trailer lot is not selling these old "hulks" from FEMA. They are just sitting there, at all odd angles, dirty and some with windows and doors hanging open.

The most eerie idea came to me. What if all these trailers are being stockpiled in case there is another disaster, where large numbers of
people have to be evacuated and housed quickly? Could the U. S. Government insist that such evacuees accept housing in such trailers, or lose the ability
to get other kinds of benefits later on?

Perhaps it is a sign from above, this "Cloud of Doom", drifting above a FEMA trailer park. No good is liable to come out of such places, just more complications, lawsuits, and misery for the people who will be forced to live in them.

We all need to wonder why they are there.