By SPA
Washington : Nearly three years after Hurricane Katrina, almost 40,000 families still are living in vulnerable mobile homes and trailers across the U.S. gulf coast with another hurricane season only two months away, the top U.S. disaster official said Wednesday.
The number is down from about 100,000 families, or about 300,000 people, in April 2006. At one point following the devastating 2005 hurricane season, the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was housing 143,000 families in mobile homes and trailers.
FEMA Administrator David Paulison said the agency, which was strongly criticized for its response when Katrina flooded New Orleans, is moving about 800 families a week to hotels, motels, or apartments. The families are either living at group sites or in trailers in front of their homes as they rebuild.
“As far as rebuilding, I did expect it to take this long,” Paulison told reporters at the National Hurricane Conference in Orlando, Florida. “But as far as housing people, I did not foresee that they would be there almost three years later.”
Paulison said FEMA was on target to move everyone from the group sites by June 1 but was having “a lot of trouble” getting some of those people displaced by Katrina to move again. “People simply don’t want to move,” he said. “It hasn’t been as easy a task to get people out as we thought it might be.”
Katrina killed 1,500 people and caused $80 billion in damage when it hit the gulf coast in late August 2005 near New Orleans, breaching the city’s levees and flooding many neighborhoods. The three worst storms of 2005—Katrina, Rita, and Wilma—together caused about $110 billion in damages.
The six-month Atlantic hurricane season begins on June 1. Forecasters are expecting above-average storm activity. The presence of so many people in mobile homes complicates preparations for the hurricane season because those families must be evacuated if a threatening storm approaches.