Let Them Breathe Poison

By Cernig

The offhand phrase "let them eat cake" uttered by the King of France' mistress, Marie Antionette, when told the poor didn't have enough bread to eat has ever since been the touchstone of elitist contempt for the common people. But imagine how much worse the impact of her words might have been if she had suggested the homeless should just breathe poison.

Our tireless researcher Kat has flagged up some reports that suggest the Bush administration - in particular FEMA, did exactly that. CNN, on January 29th:

Rep. Nick Lampson, D-Texas, said Tuesday that Federal Emergency Management Agency tried to control the outcome of a scientific study on formaldehyde in trailers used to house victims of Hurricane Katrina.

"Someone from one of the agencies, the CDC, came to our committee and reported that he had information that indicated that good science wasn't followed when a decision was made to allow people to live in basically travel trailers that were not designed to be lived in," said Lampson, chairman of the Energy and Environment Subcommittee of the House Committee on Science and Technology.

In addition, the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee -- Rep. Bennie G. Thompson, D-Mississippi -- cited medical experts who said prolonged exposure to high levels of formaldehyde can cause ailments ranging from respiratory irritation to cancer.

The committee recently obtained internal CDC e-mail which showed that "despite the efforts of CDC professionals to bring these health risks to the public's attention, those concerns were thwarted by CDC leadership for roughly eight months," Thompson said.

The Clarion-Ledger expanded upon the story the following day:

The House Committee on Science and Technology this week released e-mails from Christopher DeRosa, a CDC scientist analyzing test results on unoccupied trailers in 2006. The e-mails said FEMA repeatedly requested "we specify safe levels of exposure."

"We should be very cautious about the use of the word 'safe' in reference to formaldehyde," De Rosa wrote. "Since it is a carcinogen, it is a matter of science policy that there is no 'safe' level of exposure."

And Salon's Sheila Kaplin had even more:

In May 2006, FEMA asked ATSDR to compose a "health consultation" on the FEMA trailers. Dr. Christopher De Rosa, chief of toxicology for ATSDR, told FEMA that any report on health risks of exposure to formaldehyde would have to include information on the risk of cancer and other potential long-term problems. At that point, De Rosa was cut out of the loop. Internal ATSDR documents show that FEMA contacted two of De Rosa's staffers, who then prepared the misleading consultation. When, nine months later, De Rosa learned ATSDR had omitted the key health information in its advisory, he drafted a letter to FEMA trial attorney Patrick Edward Preston.

"I am concerned that this health consultation is incomplete and perhaps misleading," De Rosa wrote. "Formaldehyde is classified as 'reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen.' As such, there is no recognized 'safe level' of exposure. Thus, any level of exposure to formaldehyde may pose a cancer risk, regardless of duration. Failure to communicate this issue is possibly misleading, and a threat to public health."

De Rosa also wrote to [chief of the National Center for Environmental Health/Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, Dr. Howard] Frumkin, noting "FEMA's initial contact came directly to me nine months ago on this issue." "I reviewed the proposed statement and specified that they had neglected to address longer term risk including cancer." After eight months of tense negotiations, a revised report included references to the potentially harmful effects of formaldehyde. But other health information, including the likelihood of other toxic gases, such as toluene, being present, was omitted, as was De Rosa's insistence that ATSDR call for the government to take immediate action to end formaldehyde exposure to trailer residents and monitor them for long-term harmful effects. Records show that following his protests, De Rosa in October 2007 was "reassigned" out of his long-term post as director of ATSDR's divison of toxicology and environmental medicine. De Rosa was not available for comment.

Following on the back of repeated reports of Bush administration "fixing the science around the policy" on such matters as global warming, abstinence advocacy and stem cell research, this really is the most outrageous one of all. In this case, covering up the true science behind their policy put the lives of U.S. citizens who had already experienced enough tragedy at risk.

Is it too much to call this a crime against humanity? Maybe. But I'd hate to argue the moral distinctions between deliberately using poison gas on your own people and knowingly providing a means for your own people to breath poison fumes in front of even a first year philosophy class.

Bush Administration Does U-Turn On FEMA Command Chain

By Cernig

It's taken this long for the party of really big government and Big Brother to do something about their top-heavy command chain for disaster management.

The Bush administration is set to announce an overhaul of the nation's emergency response blueprint Tuesday, streamlining a chain of command that failed after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, sources familiar with the plan said yesterday.

After years of aggressive lobbying by unhappy state governments, the administration chose to restore FEMA's power to coordinate federal disaster operations. That power was undermined in the administration's previous plan -- used just once, after Katrina -- when the secretary of homeland security appointed his own officer to oversee disaster response.

Under the new plan, the head of FEMA will appoint the top coordinating officer, clarifying responsibility and, according to the states, ending confusion that caused critical delays. Congress ordered that change to the plan last year.

State leaders, who condemned an early draft of the 90-page plan as lacking substance and ignoring their input, praised the administration this week for listening to their complaints and reestablishing a federal-state hierarchy that predated the Sept 11, 2001, attacks and DHS's formation in 2003.

"They changed. It came around 180 degrees," said Tim Manning, director of homeland security and emergency management for New Mexico and spokesman for the National Emergency Management Association, whose members include his counterparts in the 49 other states. "The country will have a much better response with this plan than we had with the previous plan," which was finished just nine months before Katrina struck.

Tha changes are to be announced on Tuesday by Chertoff and FEMA Administrator R. David Paulison. The Gremlin is getting some of his power decentralised.

The plan makes clear that the homeland security secretary will remain the president's "principal federal official for domestic incident management." But it limits his ability to designate that role only in extraordinary cases, leaving operational decisions about deploying federal assets to the FEMA administrator's choice in most disasters, Manning said.

Another post-Katrina change eliminates a requirement that the homeland security secretary must declare an Incident of National Significance to trigger a more aggressive response -- a step that was delayed during the 2005 storm -- and instead spells out different standing plans for dealing with natural catastrophes and national security crises, the FEMA official said.

The DHS shift comes as Congress is once again considering whether to make FEMA an independent agency.

To my mind, there was never enough argument to establish DHS as a massive bureaucratic deprtment in its own right anyway. Politicians, in the wake of 9/11, decided they had to be seen to "do something big", and they picked the entirely wrong thing to do. Abolish it.

FEMA Wont Go Near Toxic Trailers Themselves

By Cernig

Is it a requirement for being a FEMA senior manager that you have an empathy bypass as well as a commonsensectomy?

The Federal Emergency Management Agency is barring employees from entering thousands of stored travel trailers over concerns about hazardous fumes, while more than 48,000 other trailers continue to be used by hurricane victims in Louisiana and Mississippi.

FEMA is advising employees not to enter any of the roughly 70,000 trailers in storage areas across the country, but the directive does not apply to other trailers still in use, agency spokeswoman Mary Margaret Walker said Thursday.

"It's common knowledge that formaldehyde emission levels rise when they are closed in the heat and humidity without any ventilation," Walker said.

Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., accused FEMA of using a double standard, and said it "defies logic" that occupied trailers are safer than those in storage.

"I don't really buy that argument," she said in an interview. "It makes no sense, in that most of these (occupied) trailers are closed up and locked during the day."

Many trailer occupants have asked to be moved because of concerns about formaldehyde contamination, and hundreds are suing trailer manufacturers, accusing the companies of jeopardizing their health by providing FEMA with poorly constructed campers.

Last week, FEMA indefinitely postponed plans to test for formaldehyde levels in the air inside occupied trailers, saying it needed more time to prepare.

Incredible. It's OK for poor folks but heaven forfend the employees of FEMA should have to breath carcenogenic poison too!

All this, of course, utterly unneccesary since there were plenty of vacant actual houses and apartments for rent in the South at the time of Katrina which could have housed refugees safely. Instead, though, the Republicans arranged another corporate price-gouging welfare scheme to enrich an industry that gives 90% of its campaign donations to their party. As it was, $85 million bucks worth of trailers sat unused in a field as they became more toxic every day. But the Republicans hate "big gub'mint", oh yeah.

(Hat Tip - Kat)

I'm with Capt. Ed

by shamanic

FEMA looked to be all set to bounce back from the bafflingly horrid response to Katrina by tackling the California wildfires when the in-house Department of Stupid Ideas piped up to make the agency look like a bunch of crooked buffoons all over again.

Capt. Ed calls for everyone involved to be canned, and I don't disagree. This was fakery only for the joy of fakery and completely unnecessary.

As for the White House reaction: "it is not a practice that we would employ here at the White House. We certainly don't condone it" (Dana Perino), I would strongly quibble. Executive branch agencies have been caught manipulating the media in similar ways throughout the Bush administration. Remember ace reporter Karen Ryan sending out pro-administration "news reports" to local stations? Remember Armstrong Williams accepting federal money to promote No Child Left Behind? Or Jeff Gannon, working for Bush's Texas cronies' Talon News, lobbing softballs at Scottie McClellan before hopping into the West Wing for hang out time with his buddies?

I can't imagine why FEMA personnel engaged in this type of fakery in the aftermath of a successful response to a serious disaster in a very populous state except that this type of behavior appears to be built into the Bush administration's operational DNA. Happily, it was caught quickly, but unhappily, even if everyone involved is canned, we're stuck with the same playbook for another year.