WAITING FOR RELIEF

Comic Relief, the fundraising telethon for the homeless, announced this week that it would raise money for the victims of Hurricane Katrina, many of whom still lack decent homes more than a year after the disaster struck. What the Federal Emergency Management Agency needs, however, is Tragic Relief, a telethon to take away the endless instances of bad news inflicted by the agency on the gulf region and on taxpayers.

While comedians such as Robin Williams, Billy Crystal and Whoopi Goldberg are expected to perform this weekend in Las Vegas to help the victims, Richard Skinner, the FEMA inspector general, recently completed his own show on the loss of housing due not to disaster but an absence of fresh tarps. No joke.

According to the report from Mr. Skinner, “Many of the modular homes that FEMA purchased for emergency housing after Hurricane Katrina have not been properly protected while in storage. As a result, an estimated $3 [million] to $4 million worth of such modular units are damaged beyond repair.”

FEMA, which questions the cost estimate, has stored several different types of modular homes at the Red River Army Depot in Texarkana, Texas, and those that arrived with their own protective packaging seemed to remain in fine shape. But with about $5 million worth of other homes, which did not have protective covering, “torn and deteriorating remnants of tarps that we observed … suggest they were once covered, but, at the time of our visit, they were uncovered and exposed to the weather.”

As the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, chaired by Sen. Susan Collins, discovered, the modular homes were not even suitable in many instances for the gulf region, which explains some of the long-term storage but not the absence of suitable replacements for those still in need. So while the potential loss of these homes is bad enough, worse is that 14 months after the hurricane, not enough replacement units have been brought in to remove the need for private fundraisers that are collecting money to provide, among other necessities, housing.

FEMA has been faulted, since Katrina, for its inability to respond quickly or communicate well; its integration within Homeland Security has been debated; Congress has reformed its structure and clarified its mission. But there is nothing anyone can do to help its staff figure out that if worn-out tarps could result in millions of dollars of lost housing units, then the tarps should be replaced.

That’s the sort of thing that is either known on the first day of work or it becomes a career-long mystery. For residents awaiting suitable homes along the gulf, the series of failures charged to this federal agency may mean the difference between a place to live and homelessness.