popular logistics

Adam Nossiter and Leslie Eaton reported last week in the Times that

After protesters clashed violently with the police inside and outside the New Orleans City Council chambers on Thursday, the Council voted unanimously to allow the federal government to demolish 4,500 apartments in the four biggest public housing projects here.

Advocates for public housing residents contended that HUD plan would not provide housing for all of the 3,000 families who lived in the projects before Katrina, almost all of them black.

The Council also called on the Department of Housing and Urban Development to reopen some apartments in the closed projects immediately and to rebuild all of the public housing units that it bulldozes. The agency plans to replace barracks-style projects, known as “the bricks,” with mixed-income developments.

“We need affordable housing in this city,” said Shelley Stephenson Midura, a Council member who proposed the resolution that was adopted. But, she added, “public housing ought not to be the warehouse for the poor.”

Advocates for public housing residents contended that the agency’s plan would not provide enough housing for the 3,000 families who lived in the projects before Hurricane Katrina, almost all of them black. Many of them have not been able to return to the city, and some protesters said they were being deliberately excluded from New Orleans.

“The issue is and the question remains, who’s in the mix,” said the Rev. Torin T. Sanders, pastor of the Sixth Baptist Church, referring to the plan for mixed-income housing. He and other speakers at the four-hour hearing before the vote said past redevelopment efforts had shut out most public housing residents.

The city’s shortage of low-cost housing was only going to get worse in the coming months, as the federal government tried to move more than 30,000 people out of government-owned trailers, said Courtney Cowart, strategic director of disaster response for the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana.

Jenna Wortham has a piece on Wired.com - “Slideshow: Instant Housing and Designing for Disaster.” 

Above is an image of “FutureShack,” designed by Sean Godsell.  There are eleven others, some familiar to us, others not.  We’ll try to get  more of these up - but if you have time, look at Jenna Wortham’s piece on Wired. (Wortham hs been doing excellent pieces like this, on other appropriate technology, great pieces on RFID issues - and she’s also, apparenly, Wired’s editor in charge of evaluating haggis and other things that at least some people have trouble thinking about eating. Are we missing a connection here?

NERT-the National Emergency Response Team - has a design for converting truck trailers into emergency housing for displaced persons or emergency workers:

Perhaps this is what FEMA should have prepositioned around the country.

After FEMA started providing trailers to survivors of Katrina and Rita, high levels of formaldehyde were found in many of the trailers. I first learned of this from Dr. Irwin Redlener’s excellent Americans At Risk, which we’ve referred to before, and will again. Suffice it to say for present purposes that

1. There was formaldehyde in the trailers, in which were housed many people, of every age, male and female, and varied in many ways - although probably very few of them affluent.
2. The formaldehyde is dangerous -
3. And its presence in housing - above certain parts-per-million (I believe that’s in air samples - not in the building materials themselves)
4. When FEMA officials first found out that this was a possibility  - FEMA counsel instructed them not to test - and to take the position that that was not a FEMA function - fearing that with knowledge would come responsibility.

Alas, the index of Americans at Risk does not do it justice - so a discussion of Dr. Redlener’s account will have to wait for an updated post.

“an official policy of premeditated ignorance”

Congressman Henry Waxman’s description of FEMA lawyers instructing FEMA employees not to test trailers for formaldehyde.

Professor David Michaels has been providing excellent coverage of this issue at The Pump Handle, a most-excellent public health blog.

You can read Michaels’ excellent post of July 26th here;

Michaels’ two previous posts here and here.

Michaels points out that The Washington Post, in an editorial called “FEMA’S TOXIC ENVIRONMENT,” says that the Post tells FEMA director R. David Paulison that “knocking a few heads in FEMA’s general counsel’s office would be a good first step” in sending a strong signal that the beleaguered agency needs to undergo major changes.

The Post is right, of course. Michaels links to an excellent article by Bob Egelko in the San Francisco Chronicle - citing a number of legal ethics experts - who agree that the FEMA attorneys’ behavior was unethical. These attorneys include Monroe Freedman, perhaps the best-known legal ethics expert in the United States, and Ronald Rotunda, another leading ethics expert. Ask most lawyers to name nationally known legal ethics experts, and most will give you a short list - Freedman and Rotunda would, I think, be on nearly every list.

[Disclaimer: I know and admire Monroe Freedman, and have worked with him on at least one matter].

Professor Rotunda - who has the funniest law professor’s web page that I’ve seen - was assistant majority counsel to the Ervin Committee (for you young people, that was the Senate Select Committee on what’s now referred to as “The Watergate Affair”) - which might mean he was once a Democrat - but he’s also been counsel to Ken Starr while Ken Starr was Special Prosecutor, special counsel to the Department of Defense in the current administration - would, I hope, not be offended if we described his politics as “other-than-leftist.”

My point is that there’s a consensus that government lawyers should not take the position that “we don’t do those tests, because if we did we’d be responsible for knowing about the results and acting on them.” This is not a controversial proposition.

However - will these FEMA lawyers be disciplined? Our best bet is - probably not - unless someone formally brings it to the attention of legal ethics officials in a state in which any of the attorneys is licensed. Because this involves what is probably unethical conduct - but hasn’t resulted in a conviction - although it may have made some people very, very ill - the state licensing agencies (in some states, the bar association) aren’t likely to act on the basis of news reports.

We’re going to have the crack Popular Logistics research team look at the five thousand page document set released by Congressman Waxman’s committee and report back. Stay tuned.