Crisis Management; FEMA's Role - Giles Hall

I think that the most effective way to distinguish the process by which F.E.M.A. made its decisions regarding hurricane Katrina will be to separate it into three major stages: pre-crisis affairs, mid-crisis action, and post-crisis planning. Where pre-crisis focuses on the issues of location, mobility, and resources; mid-crisis deals with response, and impermanence; and post-crisis plans for objectives, and permanence.

Before Katrina hit New Orleans’ poor lived in the sectors most susceptible to flooding. All but two of the city’s public housing projects were in areas below sea level1. Incidentally these were also the citizens unable to afford personal transportation, relying instead on buses and eventually FEMA airlifts to emergency shelters faraway. Mobility is essential to the resilient response of evacuees1; car-ownership was higher in the least-flooded areas, and so many of them have also returned to rebuild. Poverty and the subsequent immobility has been a leading contributor to the continued need for temporary housing.

Hurricane Katrina created an unprecedented need for sheltering and temporary housing across a four-state area along the Gulf Coast2. This became the primary task of FEMA mid-crisis in order to save lives and prevent an escalation of the crisis. New Orleans infrastructure had been destabilized and in some cases annihilated3. If aid took more than a few days, “the survivors [would have] no choice but to loot,” and to “live on the sidewalk under a tarp.3" Temporary housing provided by FEMA consisted of thousands of “travel trailers ready for occupancy with utilities included.4” The trouble remained however with where to locate them. “One in four FEMA trailer parks initially proposed for previously undeveloped sites were rejected by the potential host communities. Temporary trailers and trailer parks impose focused costs on local communities but provide only diffuse benefits to cities and regions as a whole. Trailers provide necessary housing for workers and families who will improve the economic conditions of the city and region, but focus potential externalities, whether actual or expected, on local host communities. States and developers around the world regularly struggle to site controversial facilities, including nuclear power plants, incinerators, and airports. Temporary housing after a disaster seems to be no exception.” After examination it was found that the final placement of trailers had an inverse relationship to voter turnout in the previous political election (Fig.1). It is apparent then that FEMA used records of voter turn out to avoid communities with an active civil society.


FEMA coordinated resources to resolve six areas of needs: disaster and recovery policy, community services, home design and construction, housing finance and insurance, community planning, and infrastructure. Although originally focused on temporary housing, its major mission is to "facilitate the coordination of re-housing.2” Long-term community redevelopment, not just short-term sheltering and temporary housing was always their focus. Katrina evacuees living in shelters, hotels and motels were told of their option to “move on” with a free one-way airplane, train or bus tickets to any destination in the continental United States. "Our goal is to get people out of the shelters and commercial housing and into a normal lifestyle,” Federal Coordinating Officer Sandy Coachman said5. In short the role of FEMA in this disaster was to offer victims a means of evacuation, shelter while in exile, the means to return.

Information Sources
1. Colten, Craig E. 2009. Vulnerability and place: Flat land and uneven risk in new orleans. American Anthropologist 4. January 6, 2008 http://www3.interscience.wiley.com.proxy.lib.uwaterloo.ca/cgi-bin/fulltext/120127630/PDFSTART. (Accessed January 10, 2010)
2.Nigg, Joanne M., John Barnshaw, and Manuel R. Torres. 2006. Hurricane katrina and the flooding of new orleans: Emergent issues in sheltering and temporary housing. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 604, (, Shelter from the Storm: Repairing the National Emergency Management System after Hurricane Katrina) (Mar.): 113-28.
3.Ethridge, Robbie. 2006. Bearing witness: Assumptions, realities, and the otherizing of katrina. American Anthropologist 108, (4): 799-813.
4. 2005. Disaster housing - Alabama's no. 1 priority. Press Release,September 26. Federal Emergency Management Agency. 1605-038. http://www.fema.gov.proxy.lib.uwaterloo.ca/news/newsrelease.fema?id=19179 (accessed January 7, 2010).
5.2005. Katrina Evacuees Have Transportation Option. Press Release, October 19. Federal Emergency Management Agency. 1606-040. http://www.fema.gov.proxy.lib.uwaterloo.ca/news/newsrelease.fema?id=19179 (accessed January 10, 2010).

Planning for Sheltering and Temporary Housing - Giles Hall

Emergency shelters are structurally sound and intended to be used for very short periods of less than twenty-four hours during and following the disaster. These facilities are often uncomfortable spaces with few amenities and are sparsely provisioned.

Temporary shelters provide facilities for individuals and families whose homes were damaged to the extent that they are no longer habitable. These usually exist for several days to several weeks, depending on how long it takes to find more normal living arrangements. These facilities have adequate sanitation facilities, sometimes food storage and preparation capabilities and can provide sleeping spaces for a few hundred people at a time. Sometimes these are indoor facilities (school gymnasiums or auditoriums) or tent cities.

Temporary housing is an intermediate stage for victims who still cannot return to their damaged homes but need housing, which allows them to return to their normal functions and tasks. These housing options are usually apartments or rental homes that evacuees use for several weeks to several years until victims can return to their original repaired or totally rebuilt homes. Victims who were renters before the disaster may skip this step entirely if appropriate rental units are available to them on a permanent basis. When rental properties are not available in the disaster-impacted area, FEMA has frequently made mobile homes available as temporary housing options, either situating a trailer on a property owner's lot (seen as more desirable by more property owners) or in mobile home parks that are in the vicinity ofthe damaged neighbourhoods (seen as less desirable from a community planning perspective, but acceptable since local residents can remain in or near the community).
Permanent (or replacement) housing is necessary when victims will never be able to return to their original homes. This occurs when the owners of the victims' rental properties have decided not to rebuild or to replace the rentals with higher cost dwellings or the victims cannot afford to rebuild their homes. If the vacancy rate in the disaster-affected area is low, disaster victims may need to relocate to other cities, counties/parishes, or states.

Long-term sheltering is needed for victims bussed or flown to temporary shelters in other states uncertain when/if they will be able to return. These must provide long-term services for the hurricane/flood victims. It is currently unknown how many residents who evacuated still need long-term sheltering; however, it should be assumed that most of them have lost their homes and their jobs, making them delayed victims of the hurricane.

Dynamic and fluid sheltering needs. Victims do not necessarily progress in a linear fashion through the four sheltering phases; nor do physical facilities provide only one type of sheltering. The Superdome, for example, served as a refuge of last resort prior to Katrina's landfall, then as an emergency shelter once flooding occurred in New Orleans, and finally as an unplanned temporary shelter for several days because of the delayed post impact evacuation.

Information Sources
Nigg, Joanne M., John Barnshaw, and Manuel R. Torres. 2006. Hurricane katrina and the flooding of new orleans: Emergent issues in sheltering and temporary housing. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 604, (, Shelter from the Storm: Repairing the National Emergency Management System after Hurricane Katrina) (Mar.): 113-28.

FEMA: permanence vs. temporary - Juan Pablo Uribe

The following text will briefly discuss FEMA camps, conditions, and how it relates to its transient nature as a form of housing.

Travel trailors can be used in emergency situations as temporary housing. They are not meant to be perminant, but rather a means to house those in need while their living situation is repaired. Another option in emergency situations is manufactured housing. The problem with this is that they have a tendency to turn into perminant housing. FEMA wants to help those in need get eventual perminant housing, however, the transitional phase between disaster and new placement needs to be something temprorary that is not so comfortable that residence will want to stay.

(...)As noted above, emergency shelters funded under Section 403 authority are intended to be temporary housing solutions.

Traditional Manufactured Housing
FEMA traditionally uses mobile homes and travel trailers to meet the needs of disaster victims when needs cannot be met through home repair or available rental units. Mobile homes are larger and are generally used to house applicants who are unable to obtain rental housing in the area. Additionally, they are intended to meet longer-term disaster housing needs. Travel trailers are smaller units that are usually parked adjacent to the home so that the individual or family can continue repairs while the home itself cannot be occupied and not have to pay for the space to park the trailer. The units are also placed on existing commercial lots and in parks created by FEMA for that purpose. The travel trailers “have been used principally for shorter-term housing needs” following disaster events. Travel trailers, unlike mobile homes, are not classified as housing or dwellings. Instead they are considered transportation since they are often moved from site to site for recreational purposes. HUD has not established standards for trailers as it has for mobile homes which are considered housing and are “designed to be used as a dwelling.”49 The distinction between housing and transportation also becomes important when considering FEMA’s own regulations which do not permit the placement of mobile homes within flood plains as temporary housing unless they are elevated above the base flood elevation.50 This allows trailers to be placed in flood plain areas on a temporary basis, particularly in group sites, while mobile homes may not. While manufactured housing is a form of temporary housing, it sometimes gains permanence for the households occupying these units. This is based on a part of the Stafford Act which provides that a unit “may be sold directly to the individual or household who is occupying the unit if the individual or household lacks permanent housing.”51 This is usually the case for applicants without other housing options.52

The Katrina Experience
Congressional testimony by a FEMA official noted that approximately 80% of manufactured dwellings were situated on private lots on the Gulf Coast.53 This points to the large number of homes with major damage following the hurricanes of 2005. During the post-Katrina recovery phase, these trailers and mobile homes were the center of controversy for several reasons. While manufactured housing is occasionally used, FEMA considers it the last housing option to be employed, and then only if home repairs are impractical or if here are no available units for rental assistance. But a catastrophic disaster such as Katrina removes many options. It not only spreads disaster victims across the nation but also makes home repair work difficult and slow at best. Additionally, a disaster of this magnitude wipes out most available rental housing in the affected area. With all of those factors considered, manufactured housing became the primary means of providing temporary housing in Gulf Coast communities for an extended period of time. This form of housing also drew the media’s attention due to a large number of units awaiting occupancy that have been stored in Hope, Arkansas.54 Some of the reasons for the purchase of the excess units and the slow pace of their issuance are discussed in the Issues section below.

Information Sources
1. Congressional Research Services. "FEMA Disaster Housing and Hurricane Katrina: Overview, Analysis, and Congressional Issues". CRS Report for Congres. 2008
http://ncseonline.org/nle/crsreports/08July/RL34087.pdf (Accessed January 7, 2010)

Airstream Caravans - Polly Auyeung

An organized Airstream trailer gathering ("Rally or Rallies") are the core of what the Vintage Airstream Club and the Wally Byam Caravan Club Int'l are all about. The rally concept is an early one from the vintage era of the 1950s — a chance to use what Wally Byam intended his Airstream trailers to do, "hit the road, travel and explore our country, sharing discoveries and great places with other fellow Airstreamers."

The invention of the Airstream International in 1957 made these rallies possible. As the first "self-contained" trailer in the industry (with the first holding tank, the first ladder frame and the first pressurized water system), it did not have to rely on an external power and water source. The freedom from being "hooked-up" made it possible for people to travel anywhere with their airstreams.

Media References and Information Sources
1. WBCCI. "Rallies". The Vintage Airsteam Club. 2009
http://vintageairstreamclub.com/ (Accessed January 7, 2010)

Airstreamer Culture - Polly Auyeung

The following article was written by a journalist who got to test the Airstream for a roadtrip. He notes that there's something elusive about the trailer that sets it apart from all the rest:

An Airstream is a shiny telegraph from mid-century America, an object that reflects our grandparents' restless, road-hungry energy. [...]

"People will buy an Airstream because it's different, and they think they are different," says Rich Luhr, editor of the enthusiast magazine Airstream Life. "They tend to be more artistic, a lot of teachers, a lot of small-business owners and entrepreneurs. They're more design oriented. They look at a white-box RV and say, 'Ugh, I can't be seen in that.'" [...]

Whatever the ratios, they all look worse when you're talking about an Airstream. The eight-metre rig the company is lending us costs $70,000 U.S.; a white-box travel trailer would go for half that.

Enthusiasts stage ambitious caravans. (Founder Byam himself thought nothing of setting off from Capetown to Cairoon in an African caravan.) They keep track of one another by way of large numbers painted on the trailers so that, whenever they see another Airstream on the road, they can look it up in the official registry.

They overnight in one another's driveways, a custom known as "courtesy parking." They band together in segregated "Airstream-only" RV parks. (Is that even legal?)

"Airstreamers don't consider themselves RVers," says Randy Bowman, an owner from San Diego who rolls up to us on his mountain bike. "They're a breed apart. It's a clique."

Information Sources
1. Neil, Dan. "Elegy for the Airstreamer". Canada.com. November 18, 2008.
http://www.canada.com/life/summer-guide/driving/Elegy+Airstreamer/827971/story.html (accessed January 7, 2010)

Orgin of Airstream Name - Caelin Schneider

Wally conceived the name “Airstream” in 1934 and began applying it to his trailers “because that’s the way they travel, like a stream of air”. In fact, they are 20% more aerodynamic than regular "boxy" trailers.

Information Sources
1. Banham, Russ. Wanderlust: Airstream at 75. Old Saybrook, Conneticut: Greenwich Publishing Group, 2005.

The Wally Byam Creed - Polly Auyeung

To place the great wide world at your doorstep
for you who yearn to travel with all the comforts
of home.

To provide a more satisfying, meaningful way of travel that offers complete travel independence, wherever and whenever you choose to go or stay.

To keep alive and make real an enduring
promise of high adventure and faraway lands...
of rediscovering old places and new interests.

To open a whole world of new experiences...
a new dimension in enjoyment where travel adventure and good fellowship are your
constant companions.

To encourage clubs and rallies that provide an endless source of friendships, travel fun and personal expressions.

To lead caravans wherever the four winds blow... over twinkling boulevards, across trackless deserts...to the traveled and untraveled corners
of the earth.

To play some part in promoting international goodwill and understanding among the peoples of the world through person-to-person contact.

To refine and perfect our product by continuous travel-testing over the highways and byways of the world.

To strive endlessly to stir the venturesome spirit that moves you to follow a rainbow to its end... and thus make your travel dreams come true.

- Wally Byam (Founder of Airstream)

Information Sources
1. WBCCI. "The Wally Byam Creed". The Vintage Airsteam Club. 2009
http://vintageairstreamclub.com/ (Accessed January 7, 2010)

Ontario Airstream Rally - Caelin Schneider

"It [Airstream] represents freedom, good taste, adventure, quality, etc. Something about a travel trailer that is 45 years old and is even better that when it was new. Airplanes are a lot like Airstreams in that they can be updated with the latest in technology & style but still keep it's unique feel. I've been in "Beaver" float planes from the early 50's that function just like new. An Airstream also makes a statement where ever it goes."

Media References & Information Sources
1. Ontario Unit WBCCI. "Spring Rallies at Almonte, Ontario". Ontario Unit WBCCI. May 26, 2008.
http://www.ontarioairstream.org/Photos/Almonte-Rally-2008.html (Accessed January 7, 2010)

The Definition of a Trailer - Felix Cheong

I've found a document from the GAO (United States Government Accountability Office) that investigated FEMA's effectiveness in handling the disaster of Hurricane Katrina. Some of the information could be pretty useful. They estimated that in Mississippi alone there were close to 135000 homes destroyed, displacing all the families living there. Therefore FEMA chose to provide travel trailers and mobile homes for these displaced persons. FEMA never meant for these trailers and mobile homes to be used for permanent settlement, so they set a date for the occupants to be evacuated. The document states that FEMA will house the victims for 18 months but that they have to right to charge the occupants for rent after that time. According to FEMA as of August 2007, 17608 households were still depending on these trailer camps for shelter, but FEMA wants all of these families out by March of 2009, which they have still not done yet.

Most of this document talks about how FEMA used up way more money than in had to in order to house the hurricane victims. The GAO breaks down how FEMA's ineffective management cost them over 30 million dollars wasted from failure to issue orders on time, fraudulent payments and bad choice of sites. Apparently it would have cost less to place these trailer camps in privately owned sites rather than commercial or group sites since FEMA had to pay extra for security, utilities and construction that they would not need in privately owned sites.

The rest of this pdf is just a very detailed breakdown of what FEMA spent money on, why and how they did it, which may not be that useful. The biggest message that I got from this is that everything is about money. Every decision that FEMA made revolved around it and they were considered not to have managed the situation very well because they used up money that they didn't have to.

One part that I found particularly interesting was the definition that FEMA gave to travel trailers and mobile homes, and how they distinguished the two. This is the quote that I found: "According to FEMA, a travel trailer is a recreational vehicle that is designed for short, temporary habitation, not housing. In contrast, a mobile (or manufactured) home is a structure, transportable in one or more sections, which is built on a permanent chassis and is designed for use with or without a permanent foundation when attached to the required utilities. The term manufactured home does not include a recreational vehicle. Generally, manufactured homes must meet the same requirements as stick built or conventional housing." I think it's fascinating how FEMA has to state that travel trailers are only designed for short term use, even though the people attacked by the hurricanes are still living in them since they have no place to go. This type of differentiation may work into the idea that we have had about temporary vs. permanent trailers.

Information Sources:
1. United States Government Accountability Office. "Ineffective FEMA Oversight of Housing Maintenance Contracts in Mississippi Resulted in Millions of Dollars of Waste and Potential Fraud". Report to the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, U.S. Senate. November 2007.
http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d08106.pdf (Accessed January 7, 2010)