10,000 Trailers

This is the visual embodiment of the federal government's failures to respond to desperate citizens in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, as outlined in a Republican House committee report earlier this week. Ten thousand fully furnished mobile homes, stuck in a former Air Force base in Hope, Arkansas, sinking into the mud, warping, being fieldstripped by thieves, and unable to be of use to the thousands of New Orleanians, who are instead being kicked out of hotels and forced to live in their cars.

Though about 55,000 Louisiana families are still waiting for a manufactured housing unit, the mobile homes may never be used because FEMA regulations prohibit them from being installed in flood-prone coastal areas, federal officials said.

Members of a Senate committee investigating the response to Hurricane Katrina called the mobile home episode an appalling example of government stumbling.

"These trailers are going to take the place of those very expensive toilet seats that we remember from Pentagon days," said Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut. "It's really absolutely unbelievable, and unacceptable."

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, FEMA ordered far too many mobile homes and too few travel trailers, which are smaller, less expensive and more portable, and can be placed on lots in the disaster zone. The federal government had expected that Louisiana officials would identify sites inland where the mobile homes could be placed. But so far, with just a few exceptions, they has not done so, officials said.

"If sites for those mobile homes are not approved in Louisiana, it is possible they will never be used for hurricane relief," said Nicol Andrews, a FEMA spokesman.

It's par for the course for a government that is thoroughly unconcerned about governing. The purchase of power and the reaping of rewards mean far more than providing basic needs and emergency relief.

I'd say this rates as more important than a hunting accident. It's deeply disturbing that we're in the process of leaving an entire U.S. city behind.