One down, 65,000 to go! Vicksburg, Miss., resident Tommy Beard verifies ownership and other details on one of the FEMA trailers being monitored by the LA-RFO Housing Team. LA-RFO Photo by George Marcec. Back to Features

FEMA tags Corps with mission to inspect trailer upkeep
By Dave Harris, public affairs specialist, Louisiana Recovery Field Office


NEW ORLEANS, LA … The good, bad and ugly of temporary trailer residences in Louisiana – you have those occupants who are grateful for a place to live – neighbors you’d love to have next door. They keep that FEMA trailer shining as if it were their own. 

Then there are the trailers where occupants trashed the place. Or trailers with the wrong, unauthorized occupants, or supposedly occupied trailers that are abandoned. 

Sandwiched between these two extremes are occupants whose trailers need reasonable repairs – a leaky roof, faucet or toilet, a stuck door or window. 

Early on, FEMA needed the human resources to manage and execute design, placement, and leasing of temporary housing, including trailers. Large contracting corporations filled the role. Later, FEMA hired small maintenance contractors to make repairs but didn’t have the staff to inspect the work to make sure the taxpayer was getting the best return on investment.

So, FEMA tasked the Army Corps of Engineers’ to provide technical monitors as a housing team, to inspect the small repairs to see if the contractors in fact did the work, and did it right so that FEMA pays the right amount, said Wyatt Kmen, housing mission manager, who deployed from Huntington, W.V., to Baton Rouge. The team verifies what is being reported by the contractors.

The trailers involved are smaller travel trailers, intermediate-size park models, full-size 14- by 60-foot mobile homes and some modular units. The size of the unit depends on the location – whether it’s on a group site or one’s private lot, if the lot is clear and has enough space, if someone needs disabled access or on restrictions such as the prohibition against putting mobile homes in a 100-year flood plain. 

What the Corps team finds all too frequently, Kmen said, are stripped trailers, the wrong persons moving in, vandalism or going to a specific spot and finding no trailer or the wrong trailer at the site. Added to those frustrations is “the amount of time our guys spend getting from one site to the next, spread out from Lake Charles to New Orleans, Plaquemines Parish, Slidell and Baton Rouge. Many of these sites are 40 minutes from anywhere. Recently an inspector drove to Napoleonville only to find the trailer was privately owned.” 

Kmen said the housing team works directly for FEMA and that much of their time is spent chasing down Congressional inquiries. On one such investigation, they found that the trailer was burned to the ground. 

He said the team members find it “most satisfying to determine that a trailer is ready to go and see people happy to move in.” 

Eighty percent of the team’s time, he said, is spent on deactivations. On such tasks the team does exit surveys and asks residents what they thought of the service they received from FEMA or contractors. Often the residents don’t comprehend or discern whether the inspectors are contractors, FEMA or Corps. 

Good listening skills are a necessary part of this front-line job.  A query about a repair can turn into a long dissertation on a resident's Katrina response and after-life in a Katrina trailer park.

“We hear everything from ‘very pleased’ to ‘the contractor was gone’ to ‘we hated every part of it’ or ‘the process was slow’ and ‘the trailer was a mess,’” he said. “Any surveys are never a five-minute in-and-out process.”   

Kmen said that violence has never been directed at the team members, but they’ve heard occupants voice threats against FEMA. Because of stringent multiple-entity checks and balances, a team member may hear, “You’re the fifth person to come out here and make sure this trailer is gone.” 

He related that one of the most humorous incidents was in checking on how to resolve a Congressional inquiry. 

“A lady told me how much she weighs, how much her stomach weighs and that she couldn’t fit in the shower,” he said. “She was going to start bathing outside, and this was a group site. I wrote up the report and emailed it to FEMA saying, ‘Here are some things you want to know.’ I put her remarks under ‘Here are some things you don’t want to know.’  FEMA mailed me back and said, ‘We will take care of this.’” 

Even with the noteworthy or outlandish episodes, Kmen said he has yet to have a bad day. “The best days are when we have a busy time from the moment we walk in the door until we pull into the hotel parking lot each day – we don’t get to sit there long; we know something’s going to happen.” 

He admitted to one drawback the team must endure. 

“Sometimes we have downpours for several hours while we’re still trying to get inspections done,” he said. “But this is a good bunch of guys. Most have deployed previously and they know things change from day to day.” 

He noted, however, that some teammates are new to the mission, and that the team includes 21 reemployed annuitants. 

“The hard part with retirees is asking all of them to use their computer skills – they have to access the FEMA database and reports. Some say learning computer skills is a main reason they volunteered. They say, ‘I thought I should learn how to use one.’” 

FEMA site manager Kenneth Ragas tests the access ramp for one of the trailers equipped for a disabled resident. The Corps temporary housing team inspects repairs for hundreds of FEMA trailers. LA-RFO photo by Spec. Larry Gleeson

FEMA had asked the Corps to take on the inspection role, and the Corps turned to the housing unit at districts such as Huntington, where members are part of a PRT – planning response team, Kmen said. The Corps has housing PRTs in five to six districts among which deployments are rotated.  

First into the disaster area is a management cell that determines the extent of needed response. In about a week others may deploy – specialists in such fields as design, quality assurance, contracting and real estate. Teams may move and install temporary housing from a staging area to the affected private property. In other cases the team constructs a staging area or group sites.  

He said his team has previously deployed after storms in Virginia, the Carolinas, Florida, Alabama and Mississippi. Huntington and the other housing PRT districts have also deployed to Missouri, Kansas, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Kentucky and tribal reservations in the Dakotas conducting recovery operations in the wake of tornadoes, hurricanes or flooding. 

He said that the team here is working under an interagency agreement.  

“This fall, we’re scheduled to pack up our stuff and go away. FEMA is attempting to hire tech monitors to replace us. Their goal is to be self-sufficient. Our goal is to see trailer anchors up, trailers deactivated and site restored so you can’t tell where the sewer connection was, and the water reconnected to houses. As of last week, we completed 1,800 with 1,500 good to go and 300 still needing attention. 

Kmen looked beyond the everyday tasks the team takes on and assessed the difficulties victims go through in seeking adequate shelter, including the trailers for a time.  

“It’s hard for everybody. It’s hard for people in group sites living with 100 or 200 other families two, three or more miles from their damaged house, or in the case of a renter, they may find that their house doesn’t exist. Or someone lives in a trailer on their front yard seeing their house demolished or gutted. If they don’t have the means to move forward, it can be pretty discouraging. Maybe next month they can buy one more sheet of sheetrock.”  

He said the team does what it can. 

“We talk to our FEMA contact,” he said.  

“We try not to walk away from anybody without giving them some sort of satisfaction.”