Trailer storage costs mount

• By GREG GARLAND
• Advocate Westside bureau
• Published: Nov 16, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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The Federal Emergency Management Agency is paying more than $2 million a year to lease privately owned land in Louisiana to store thousands of travel trailers, most of which are expected to be sold for scrap.

The trailers to be scrapped are small travel models with levels of formaldehyde that limit FEMA’s ability to resell them for use by the public.

The once-ubiquitous white trailers, deployed after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, are parked just inches apart and spread like blankets of snow across farm fields in remote areas of Pointe Coupee and St. Landry parishes.

FEMA is paying $79,467 a month to lease one 447-acre Pointe Coupee site and $101,888 a month for a similarly sized tract in St. Landry, according to contract documents The Advocate obtained through a U.S. Freedom of Information Act request.

A staging area in Lottie, a small town in Pointe Coupee Parish about 35 miles west of Baton Rouge, has been open for just over a year and holds 25,634 trailers. Part of the site flooded during Hurricane Gustav, FEMA officials acknowledged, damaging about 50 trailers.

The other site, in Melville in St. Landry Parish, opened in April and is rapidly filling up. FEMA officials say they expect to put 21,400 travel trailers and nearly 3,500 larger “park models” and mobile homes there.

The cost of transporting and storing the trailers and securing the sites is drawing fire.

Leslie Paige, a spokeswoman for Citizens Against Government Waste, said FEMA’s purchase and handling of the trailers has been “a debacle from the get-go.”

Taxpayers are owed a full accounting and explanation for how much money is being spent on trailers destined to be scrapped, she said.

Formaldehyde roadblock

Jim Stark, FEMA assistant administrator for Gulf Coast recovery efforts, said lawsuits filed over potentially dangerous levels of formaldehyde in the trailers disrupted the agency’s plans for disposing of them.

FEMA had planned to sell trailers to disaster victims who wanted to keep them, he said. Others were to be taken to small staging areas where officials would quickly determine if they were salvageable for use in future disasters or should be sold for scrap or to the general public.