How not to respond

Monday, July 14, 2008 | 2:06 a.m.

The company that built 40 percent of the trailers furnished by the Federal Emergency Management Agency for victims of Hurricane Katrina knew shortly after the trailers were in place in early 2006 that formaldehyde fumes in many of them were testing at unhealthy levels.

Testimony last week before a congressional committee, though, revealed that the company kept the results to itself. Many trailer residents had to wait until this year for federal confirmation that it was formaldehyde, a chemical used widely in building materials, that was making them sick.

Fifty thousand of the trailers were furnished by Gulf Stream Coach, an Indiana company, for a price of $520 million. Almost immediately after people began moving in, Gulf Stream began receiving complaints.

The company tested 11 occupied trailers and the results showed all of them containing formaldehyde gas at levels well above a standard set by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Tests on nearly 40 unoccupied trailers revealed hazardous levels in more than half of them.

Yet the company notified neither residents of the trailers nor FEMA of the test results.

Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee leaped to the company’s defense, saying government agencies had the responsibility to ensure the trailers’ safety.

The committee’s chairman, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., however, told Gulf Stream Chairman Jim Shea: “It sounds like you handled it very carefully as a public relations and a legal problem. But I think you had more responsibility to the people living in the trailers.”

Our view is that a special commission should be appointed to prepare a report about the whole episode involving the trailers. The agonizingly slow responses by the CDC and FEMA to people’s complaints of getting sick have not ever been properly explained, let alone this latest revelation. With details of the multitude of mistakes that occurred, new regulations could be written that would offer at least some assurance the federal response to victims of future disasters will be more efficient.