"Taking the trailors away? Oh man, that's hilarious."
Cj, I don't think these people think its hilarious as you do. You should be ashamed, laughing at their misfortune. Maybe when a storm wipes your home off the map and your insurance wont cover it and you cant go bankrupt and you lose everything you will think thats funny too.
http://ktla.trb.com/news/la-na-trailers20may20,0,717246.story?coll=ktla-news-1
----------
30 Days' Notice at the FEMA Trailer
Eviction letters go out to about 3,000 Katrina victims, who are told they're ineligible.
By Richard Fausset, Times Staff Writer
May 20, 2006
D'IBERVILLE, Miss. — The mail carrier brought the registered letter to Jessica Lessard's tiny trailer, along with a sour and foreboding comment:
"I hope you got better news than I got," she said.
Lessard, 24, tore open the envelope and felt like crying. The letter was from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. It said she and her family had 30 days to leave the flimsy, government-issued box that has been their home since Hurricane Katrina.
Three weeks later, Lessard; her fiance, George Courtney; and their 3-year-old son are still worried, though they have appealed their case. The house they once shared with Courtney's stepfather was ruined by the storm, and they can't afford the Gulf Coast's post-Katrina rents. Nearby relatives are also in trailers or in homes with no room for them.
Lessard's family is one of about 3,000 in Mississippi that have been deemed ineligible for a trailer as FEMA weeds out those Katrina victims who do not meet the qualifications for its emergency housing program.
About 450 households have received eviction letters from FEMA; the rest are scheduled to receive notices in the next few weeks. Mississippi has 38,000 FEMA trailers. Some are clustered on open fields and parking lots; others are parked next to water-spoiled homes.
(Similar eviction efforts are underway in Louisiana, which has 68,000 trailers sprinkled around the state. There, however, officials are in the early stages of screening, and only 57 ineligible families have been identified, an agency spokeswoman said.)
The reasons for the evictions are varied, and many are legitimate. There are trailer dwellers who could not prove they are legal U.S. residents; people who had owned a second, undamaged home all along; and people whose homes were damaged, but not by Katrina.
The trailers, which are generally 240 square feet, are returned to a FEMA staging area in Purvis, Miss., where they are cleaned and repaired, then stored until they are needed again.
But a number of residents said they were being kicked out erroneously, or for technicalities that arise from gray areas in FEMA regulations. Lessard's problem is one of the most common: FEMA officials told her she was ineligible because someone from her previous residence had also requested a trailer.
Lessard said her fiance's stepfather had indeed received a FEMA mobile home — it is crammed with six people. But that doesn't necessarily mean she can't have one. FEMA guidelines say the agency "may consider" more than one housing application from extended families who were living on one property before the storm.
If Lessard and Courtney lose their appeal, they figure they'll go to a hotel for a few days. They can imagine the money running out there, but they cannot imagine what comes next.
"We really ain't got no place to go," said Courtney, 28, who is making about $8 an hour working at an auto parts store. "I just started a new job. We ain't got no money saved up."
Affordable housing is in short supply on a coast that largely remains in ruins more than eight months after the storm. Rents have soared about 25% to 30%, according to the Biloxi Ocean Springs Assn. of Realtors. More than half the coast's subsidized housing stock was uninhabitable as of mid-April, according to a survey by the Mississippi Center for Justice, a public interest law firm.
Just one shelter on the coast is open, and it accepts only men, said Natalie Presley of the Back Bay Mission, a homeless services center in Biloxi.
"We're two weeks before the resumption of a new hurricane season," said Reilly Morse, a Center for Justice attorney who has been helping people appeal their evictions. "Now FEMA is making a catastrophe worse, if that's possible. It's taking people and putting them on the street, essentially."
FEMA is particularly sensitive about the eviction letters. Eugene Brezany, an agency spokesman, insisted that they not be called "evictions" at all. He said the notifications, which began going out in late April, were preceded by letters that alerted residents to their ineligible status. He also said residents are given 60 days to appeal.
"We're not requesting anything unreasonable," he said.
But in at least some cases, the original letters were vaguely worded. Lessard's first letter from FEMA, dated Dec. 7, said she did not qualify for "rental assistance." It mentioned nothing about her trailer, which FEMA has been providing to her rent-free. So she thought she had nothing to worry about.
Morse noted that the 60-day appeal process is of little use to residents who are evicted while their appeal is pending. He worried that the letters were scaring off poorly educated people who don't understand how to file an appeal.
The effect of the letters was evident throughout Lessard's neighborhood, the End of the Rainbow RV park, a maze of gravel driveways lined with white FEMA trailers next to a junkyard.
Heather Walden, the manager, said that about a third of the park's 90-plus households had moved away in recent weeks. Most, she said, had been scared off by the eviction notices. She walked by some of the empty trailers. On one door was a notice from FEMA.
"You have been assigned a FEMA Housing Advisor," it stated. "We have not been able to contact you by telephone and must speak with you right away."
The park manager shook her head. She had no idea what had become of this family. It was like that with most of the families who left.
"It's a mess, it really is," said Walden, 27, who received an eviction notice herself but was able to fight it with the help of a pro bono lawyer. "It's not right what they're doing."
She introduced Frankie Owens, whose rental home in nearby Saucier was destroyed in the storm. Owens is illiterate. But he sensed something was awry when a registered envelope was delivered to his FEMA trailer a few weeks ago.
He took it across the gravel drive to Walden, who read him the terms of his eviction. "I'm 55 years old and disabled, and they're going to throw me out of here," Owens said, his voice rising in anger. He said he had no idea where he would go next.
Elsewhere in Mississippi, residents are fighting FEMA officials who determined that their homes did not sustain enough damage for them to qualify for trailers.
Diana McBride's rental house suffered roof damage and mold. FEMA, she said, determined that it was livable. But she says she cannot stay there because the mold exacerbates her chronic bronchitis and asthma.
McBride, 53, has appealed her case and is hoping to stay in the Gulfport trailer that FEMA provided her around Christmas.
"They tell me that even with my appeal, on the 21st I have to be gone," McBride said.
Julia East of Long Beach, Miss., returned to her own mobile home six days after Katrina to find it had been knocked off its foundation and flooded.
FEMA gave East, her husband and two sons a trailer, and $1,800 to fix up their mobile home. That was enough to clear away three large trees that fell on the home and to set it back on its blocks.
But East said water still pours down the inside of the walls when it rains. The family has been crammed into the 8-by-30-foot FEMA trailer, which they set up a few yards away.
Last month, East said, she received a phone call from FEMA asking if she was ready to give up the trailer. She panicked, and thought about the month the family spent living in tents on their property immediately after the storm.
East, 33, was able to find a lawyer who helped her file an appeal at no charge. She is frightened of what will happen if the appeal falls through. Her husband has a good job in a computer plant, but the family is still paying off debt from her cancer treatments.
"We can't finance a piece of bubblegum," she said.
If FEMA takes away her trailer, she said, she will unfold her tents once again.
----------
I'm still waiting 4 the MSM to acknowledge an eyewitness account that the 9th ward levee did NOT breech until AFTER A WIND-DRIVEN, GRAIN BARGE PLOWED INTO IT.
the eyewitness evacuee was interviewed in the Astrodome & was african-american. he stated he owned the house by the breech & that the levee was holding when he saw the grain barge plow into it. he said that the dry-side of the levee immediately began to leak which grew worse until it burst.
afteraction pics of the dryed-out 9th ward clearly show a landlocked GRAIN BARGE atop the rubble of houses.
another interesting factoid not on the MSM radar. How come the ~15K low wage hispanics in orleans parish (Y2K census, probably undercounted) could GET THE HELL OUT yet ~50k low wage african-americans could not?
clearly the chattering class was consumed in a predictable orgy of bush-bashing & still can't be bothered by facts, follow-up, nor actual analysis.
worse, are our countermeasures based on this crap "news" that stinks worse the the new orleans stench?
Mark,
Let me get this straight, Michael Brown says he didn't know there was anyone at the Superdome,
Zahn: you’re not telling me that you just learned that the folks at the convention center didn’t have food and water until today, are you? You had no idea that they were completely cut off?
Brown: Paula, the federal government did not even know about the convention center people until today.
Apparently, the media knew the New Orleans Convention Center was a shelter for hurricane victims before the Bush Administration did. Meanwhile, victims at the convention center are facing “horrible, horrible conditions” where people are lying sick and dead on the streets.
Mark, remember events any way you like, print anything you like in your blog.
The fact remains that history will not be kind to the current administration. Deal with it.
Mike
I couple of things...
I clearly remember seeing Coast Guard helos rescuing people, and I also remember that the thousands of people floating in the streets was conjured up by LA officials, not the media.
Mark, why happened to that MASSIVE Gulf coast rebuilding project that Bush promised? Nothing has been rebuild and FEMA is taking away the trailers for people leaving them homeless.
Why is it when the leveees were rebuilt, they were rebuilt so they were even weaker than before the hurricane?
Why was FEMA handing out cash cards to people who went out and bought cars, spent it on booze and gambled it away in casinos while the people that really needed it never got it because all their identification was destroyed in the hurricane?
Why are people to this day still living in tents, totally forgotten by the bush administration?
Bush cares about those people huh? The proof is in the pudding.
Deleted - off topic
Deleted - off topic
Mike, You are confusing the Superdome and the Convention Center- 2 different places. The Superdome was the official site. No one was supposed to use the Convention Center. Therefore, no provision were made at the Convention Center and FEMA was never told about it because it wasn't supposed to happen. As for the Superdome, they stocked for what they expected to be the usual amount of time until the hurricane passed. But then the levees didn't do the job and the flooding happened, increasing the tragedy exponentially. Believe me, the media hyped this and spread rumors that were not substantiated. Even the Times-Picayune newspaper ran articles about this crazy reporting. Yet you swallow it all, hook, line, and sinker.
Mike,
Ah, but you really blame President Bush for not knowing....as if the President of the United States should know precisely where the first responders are...he's President of the United States, not Boss of the 9th Ward, ya know?
The main thing is that almost all of what was reported about Katrina has proven to be mythical...and now we know for certain that federal forces were "Johnny-on-the-spot" from the get-go; you blame Bush for them not being so...but they were; so now you must praise Bush for them being there, right?
But you won't - because you hate President Bush and the initial lies about Katrina are more pleasing to you than the truth.
Axis,
Do you get info from any place other than, say, Counterpunch?
Mark,
After Katriona Bush adressed the nation and said "No one could have forseen that the levees would break"
We all found out later from the associated press that Bush had plenty of warning to get things ready, was specificially told about the dome not holding, the levees not holding and the flooding, told to him days in advance.
What did he do? Nothing. Stayed on vacation for 2 days after it hit, while thousands drowned and died of heat stroke, Condi Rice when shoe shopping and michael chernoff figured attending a bird flu conference in atlanta was more important than organizing disaster relief.
I get news from plenty of places, am a bit more liberal minded than you who believes if its not on Fox News, then its not true.
Do you get info from any place other than, say, Counterpunch?
The briefing to Bush discussed overtopping, not breaching, different things. I don't know who you guys are but I hope your attention to facts is better in your work or school endeavors than it appears to be here. And "thousands" did not die, despite hysterical claims of 10,000 likely deaths. Condi Rice is secretary of state. She doesn't handle domestic disaster relief. When the flu epidemic hits let us know how you feel about preparadness. Read the media blog at nationalreview.com today for an excellent summary of the massive, impressive response within the first two days following the disaster. But you won't read it, will you? Never let facts stand in the way of your narrative.
Taking the trailors away? Oh man, that's hilarious. Are you telling me that they couldn't find a job in 8 months? How sad and pathetic you are.
Axis
You may have missed Mayor Nagin's response just a few days ago.
In his victory speech late Saturday night, Nagin praised President Bush.
"You and I have probably been the most vilified politicians in the country. But I want to thank you for moving that promise that you made in Jackson Square forward," Nagin said.
I'm guessing that Axis is a full blown member of DailyKos, Dummyunderground, Crooksandliars, etc.
Of course, the great irony is that none of us here can post on those sites because you are banned for not having the left wing group think within a day. Yet, he continues to post here day in and day out.
Oh the irony. The left bans you for having alternative ideas, the right lets you post away here just to show what a complete moron you are Axis.
Keep it up.
"Taking the trailors away? Oh man, that's hilarious."
Cj, I don't think these people think its hilarious as you do. You should be ashamed, laughing at their misfortune. Maybe when a storm wipes your home off the map and your insurance wont cover it and you cant go bankrupt and you lose everything you will think thats funny too.
http://ktla.trb.com/news/la-na-trailers20may20,0,717246.story?coll=ktla-news-1
----------
30 Days' Notice at the FEMA Trailer
Eviction letters go out to about 3,000 Katrina victims, who are told they're ineligible.
By Richard Fausset, Times Staff Writer
May 20, 2006
D'IBERVILLE, Miss. — The mail carrier brought the registered letter to Jessica Lessard's tiny trailer, along with a sour and foreboding comment:
"I hope you got better news than I got," she said.
Lessard, 24, tore open the envelope and felt like crying. The letter was from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. It said she and her family had 30 days to leave the flimsy, government-issued box that has been their home since Hurricane Katrina.
Three weeks later, Lessard; her fiance, George Courtney; and their 3-year-old son are still worried, though they have appealed their case. The house they once shared with Courtney's stepfather was ruined by the storm, and they can't afford the Gulf Coast's post-Katrina rents. Nearby relatives are also in trailers or in homes with no room for them.
Lessard's family is one of about 3,000 in Mississippi that have been deemed ineligible for a trailer as FEMA weeds out those Katrina victims who do not meet the qualifications for its emergency housing program.
About 450 households have received eviction letters from FEMA; the rest are scheduled to receive notices in the next few weeks. Mississippi has 38,000 FEMA trailers. Some are clustered on open fields and parking lots; others are parked next to water-spoiled homes.
(Similar eviction efforts are underway in Louisiana, which has 68,000 trailers sprinkled around the state. There, however, officials are in the early stages of screening, and only 57 ineligible families have been identified, an agency spokeswoman said.)
The reasons for the evictions are varied, and many are legitimate. There are trailer dwellers who could not prove they are legal U.S. residents; people who had owned a second, undamaged home all along; and people whose homes were damaged, but not by Katrina.
The trailers, which are generally 240 square feet, are returned to a FEMA staging area in Purvis, Miss., where they are cleaned and repaired, then stored until they are needed again.
But a number of residents said they were being kicked out erroneously, or for technicalities that arise from gray areas in FEMA regulations. Lessard's problem is one of the most common: FEMA officials told her she was ineligible because someone from her previous residence had also requested a trailer.
Lessard said her fiance's stepfather had indeed received a FEMA mobile home — it is crammed with six people. But that doesn't necessarily mean she can't have one. FEMA guidelines say the agency "may consider" more than one housing application from extended families who were living on one property before the storm.
If Lessard and Courtney lose their appeal, they figure they'll go to a hotel for a few days. They can imagine the money running out there, but they cannot imagine what comes next.
"We really ain't got no place to go," said Courtney, 28, who is making about $8 an hour working at an auto parts store. "I just started a new job. We ain't got no money saved up."
Affordable housing is in short supply on a coast that largely remains in ruins more than eight months after the storm. Rents have soared about 25% to 30%, according to the Biloxi Ocean Springs Assn. of Realtors. More than half the coast's subsidized housing stock was uninhabitable as of mid-April, according to a survey by the Mississippi Center for Justice, a public interest law firm.
Just one shelter on the coast is open, and it accepts only men, said Natalie Presley of the Back Bay Mission, a homeless services center in Biloxi.
"We're two weeks before the resumption of a new hurricane season," said Reilly Morse, a Center for Justice attorney who has been helping people appeal their evictions. "Now FEMA is making a catastrophe worse, if that's possible. It's taking people and putting them on the street, essentially."
FEMA is particularly sensitive about the eviction letters. Eugene Brezany, an agency spokesman, insisted that they not be called "evictions" at all. He said the notifications, which began going out in late April, were preceded by letters that alerted residents to their ineligible status. He also said residents are given 60 days to appeal.
"We're not requesting anything unreasonable," he said.
But in at least some cases, the original letters were vaguely worded. Lessard's first letter from FEMA, dated Dec. 7, said she did not qualify for "rental assistance." It mentioned nothing about her trailer, which FEMA has been providing to her rent-free. So she thought she had nothing to worry about.
Morse noted that the 60-day appeal process is of little use to residents who are evicted while their appeal is pending. He worried that the letters were scaring off poorly educated people who don't understand how to file an appeal.
The effect of the letters was evident throughout Lessard's neighborhood, the End of the Rainbow RV park, a maze of gravel driveways lined with white FEMA trailers next to a junkyard.
Heather Walden, the manager, said that about a third of the park's 90-plus households had moved away in recent weeks. Most, she said, had been scared off by the eviction notices. She walked by some of the empty trailers. On one door was a notice from FEMA.
"You have been assigned a FEMA Housing Advisor," it stated. "We have not been able to contact you by telephone and must speak with you right away."
The park manager shook her head. She had no idea what had become of this family. It was like that with most of the families who left.
"It's a mess, it really is," said Walden, 27, who received an eviction notice herself but was able to fight it with the help of a pro bono lawyer. "It's not right what they're doing."
She introduced Frankie Owens, whose rental home in nearby Saucier was destroyed in the storm. Owens is illiterate. But he sensed something was awry when a registered envelope was delivered to his FEMA trailer a few weeks ago.
He took it across the gravel drive to Walden, who read him the terms of his eviction. "I'm 55 years old and disabled, and they're going to throw me out of here," Owens said, his voice rising in anger. He said he had no idea where he would go next.
Elsewhere in Mississippi, residents are fighting FEMA officials who determined that their homes did not sustain enough damage for them to qualify for trailers.
Diana McBride's rental house suffered roof damage and mold. FEMA, she said, determined that it was livable. But she says she cannot stay there because the mold exacerbates her chronic bronchitis and asthma.
McBride, 53, has appealed her case and is hoping to stay in the Gulfport trailer that FEMA provided her around Christmas.
"They tell me that even with my appeal, on the 21st I have to be gone," McBride said.
Julia East of Long Beach, Miss., returned to her own mobile home six days after Katrina to find it had been knocked off its foundation and flooded.
FEMA gave East, her husband and two sons a trailer, and $1,800 to fix up their mobile home. That was enough to clear away three large trees that fell on the home and to set it back on its blocks.
But East said water still pours down the inside of the walls when it rains. The family has been crammed into the 8-by-30-foot FEMA trailer, which they set up a few yards away.
Last month, East said, she received a phone call from FEMA asking if she was ready to give up the trailer. She panicked, and thought about the month the family spent living in tents on their property immediately after the storm.
East, 33, was able to find a lawyer who helped her file an appeal at no charge. She is frightened of what will happen if the appeal falls through. Her husband has a good job in a computer plant, but the family is still paying off debt from her cancer treatments.
"We can't finance a piece of bubblegum," she said.
If FEMA takes away her trailer, she said, she will unfold her tents once again.
----------
You people have to be kidding. How damn long do you think Fema should care for these people? I just find it hard to believe 8 months later these people can't get their shit together. If Fema didn't "evict" them, hell they'd never leave. This is another example of Liberal "socialism". Let's just take care of these people forever. That is why New Orleans was in the shape it was before the storm. 80% population on the dole, other 20% crooked politicians and business owners with the politicians in their back pockets. You know, these people knew about this storm for about a week, but couldn't get out. I bet if they found out about a free bingo game that morning they would have got out to it. I'm sick of all this crap, I've lived through floods, never got a damn thing from Fema, rebuilt our place and moved on. Didn't then, and don't now expect the government to take care of me! It's time these people lace up the bootstraps and move on. You know, your decisions in life are just that, decisions, good or bad you are the one that has to live with them!
You people have to be kidding. How damn long do you think Fema should care for these people? I just find it hard to believe 8 months later these people can't get their shit together. If Fema didn't "evict" them, hell they'd never leave. This is another example of Liberal "socialism".
--Hmmm. Hurricane comes in, knocks out levees, floods city. Insurance covers hurricane, but not flood. House is totalled, must be demolished. Can't declare bankruptcy, no money, no home, no hope.
Let's kick them onto the street so they are homeless.
Typically conservative thinking. Maybe this year the hurricane will wipe out your home Paul. Then we'll take your only home away and let you sleep in a refrigerator box. What goes around, comes around.