I would have posted this yesterday but the internet was knocked out town-wide all day long and by the time I came back from watching the sunset, I had forgotten I'd written it. Still it's a timely piece that was underplayed, so I'm posting it now.
It's not just about incompetency anymore. This latest revelation of deliberate failure to warn would fall squarely into criminal negligence.
WASHINGTON - The Federal Emergency Management Agency has suppressed warnings from its own Gulf coast field workers since the middle of 2006 about suspected health problems that may be linked to elevated levels of formaldehyde gas released in FEMA-provided trailers, lawmakers said today.
At a hearing Thursday of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, investigators released internal e-mails indicating that FEMA lawyers rejected environmental testing out of fear that the agency would then become legally liable if health problems emerged among as many as 120,000 families displaced by Hurricane Katrina who lived in trailers.
Another FEMA attorney on June 15 advised, "[d]o not initiate any testing until we give the OK. . . . Once you get results and should they indicate some problem, the clock is running on our duty to respond to them."
Heckuva job there. What better use of our tax dollars than funding these miscreants' protection of GOP interests while shirking their duty to protect the public? I mean, it might get their cronies in trouble if people found out they knowingly provided defective housing to survivors who most likely would vote Democratic anyway.
Highlights from the hearings are here and digging into the archives, Cernig reminds us how they came to buy those defective trailers in the first place. It's been almost two years since Katrina hit, but the slow motion domestic genocide just keeps going on.
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