FEMA Mobile Homes Seen For Miles

By KTHV Staff

LITTLE ROCK, AR -- For as far as the eye can see at one Arkansas airport, all you see is mobile homes meant for hurricane victims. That's the case in Hope, Arkansas.

It's considered a staging area or, basically, a big outdoor warehouse for FEMA and its emergency housing inventory.

There are tens of thousands of people on the Gulf Coast wanting the mobile homes and there they sit, more than 10,000 of them. They're not moving from the Hope airport, even though officials in St. Bernard Parish, LA are so desperate for help, they've started taking trailers without FEMA authorization.

The problem is FEMA says it has run into some challenges getting the ones in Hope to the Gulf Coast.

FEMA spokesman David Passey says, "The fact that these areas are in flood-prone areas or there may be local restrictions that prevent us from moving mobile homes into those areas, or sometimes the local utilities, the water and the waste water haven't been restored yet."

Arkansas Congressman Mike Ross has written three letters to FEMA asking why the trailers are still here.

He says, "In a matter of weeks, we built military bases in Iraq, in a land far, far away. If we can do that, we should have the resources here at home to get people who lost their homes, five months after the storm, get them out of hotel rooms, out of cars, out of tents and get them into these manufactured homes."

An employee at the aviation center at the Hope airport tells us it's quiet around there now because one of the two runways is being used to store the mobile homes. When the wind is just so, on certain days, that's the only airport pilots can use. Nevertheless, because the airport sits on city land, any decision made there is made by the city.

The city has leased this land to the federal government through most of 2007. A FEMA spokesman doesn't know how long they'll stay. Congressman Ross wants to collaborate with FEMA to get them out of there.

FEMA may even use the trailers for other national disasters if they can't use all of them for Katrina relief. FEMA is paying the city of Hope $25,000 a month to store the trailers.