New Orleans mayor pushing residents to leave FEMA trailers

Lingering fears about formaldehyde fumes inside federally issued trailers and the impending hurricane season have Mayor Ray Nagin pushing to empty thousands of the structures, intended as temporary housing after Katrina.

With the third anniversary of Katrina coming up Aug. 29, the push is the first for the city, where most of the remaining trailers sit on private property as residents continue to rebuild their homes.

"We need to get everybody out," Nagin said. "We need to find out if anybody's health has been harmed and how do we deal with that, and find the housing that's necessary so these people can get their lives together."

Nearly 5,700 trailers remain in New Orleans, most on the private property of residents who lost their homes to Katrina.

"I want to be gone as much as anybody," said KC King, whose home was heavily damaged by Katrina and later demolished. He said he has been dealing with a series of contractor delays in rebuilding.

Federal, state and local efforts are under way to assist families with housing needs. It's probable that some families now in trailers will end up in hotels or apartments, at least temporarily.

But Nagin, in an interview late last week, said he has no choice but to push an end to use of the trailers, given health concerns and the June 1 start of the hurricane season.

The tough stance is a post-Katrina departure for Nagin. Until now, he has refused to pressure residents in trailers because of issues including a lack of affordable housing and problems with them getting timely rebuilding grants or enough money to finish building their homes.

In a letter to President Bush in late February, Nagin wrote that a federal plan to move people from trailers to apartments and hotels over concerns about formaldehyde fumes would lead to a "second great displacement" of New Orleans residents.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has been criticized for its response to concerns about high levels of formaldehyde fumes in such homes used by victims of the 2005 Gulf Coast hurricanes. About 24,600 travel trailers and mobile homes remained occupied in Louisiana and Mississippi, and the agency has stepped up efforts to move residents.

In New Orleans, the city is working with the state and FEMA on housing options. One proposal being floated would redirect federal aid now paying for hotels or apartments for displaced residents toward fixing up damaged homes. It's not very likely that the proposal could come to fruition by August, when hurricane season ramps up in earnest, raising fears that the trailers could not withstand a hurricane.

Some City Council members have raised concerns about jostling residents from trailers to even more temporary quarters — apartments and hotels, if they have no other place to go.

Andrew Thomas, a FEMA spokesman, said Wednesday that the agency will work with parishes and homeowners to see where families are in their "long-term housing plan" and transitioning from trailers.

"We want people back into permanent housing, because it's safer with hurricane season almost here," he said. But "we're not just going to take the trailer away because of a date on the calendar, if they're making progress in getting back into their home."

Meanwhile Wednesday, President Bush's hurricane recovery chief said the large number of errors in grants given to homeowners through the Road Home program "revictimizes the victims" by making them repay aid they received. The program, funded mainly by federal dollars, gives grants to homeowners with severe damage from hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Retired Maj. Gen. Douglas O'Dell told The Associated Press he is concerned about the timeliness and accuracy of the grants awarded through the program, run by private contractor ICF International Inc.

State officials estimate 130,000 homeowners will receive grants. As many as 5,000 are expected to have received too much money, and ICF has moved to hire a subcontractor to collect overpayments.

The company didn't immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday about the number of errors in grants.

Study: Sediment Makes New Orleans Sink

NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- Heavy sediment deposited in the Mississippi River delta in the last ice age has caused New Orleans to sink and will continue to drag down coastal Louisiana bit by bit for hundreds of years, according to a new study by NASA and Louisiana State University scientists.

The study, published recently in Geophysical Research Letters, adds an important perspective to the puzzle of natural and human factors complicating the effort to save New Orleans.

The weight of glacial period sediments has caused coastal Louisiana to sink between .04 inches and 0.3 inches a year and will continue to do so for hundreds of years, the study said. New Orleans, it said, will sink about 0.17 inches a year, or nearly three feet over the next 200 years.

Parts of the city are 5-10 feet below sea level now.

''It's sort of one of these processes that you can't stop,'' said Erik Ivins, a scientist with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and the study's lead researcher.

The study was done by comparing a 60-year-old catalog of elevation measurements in coastal Louisiana to a model of the Earth's crust over the past 750,000 years that calculated the rate of sinking by both the weight of sea level rise and the flow of sediments into the Gulf of Mexico. The mathematical study corroborates a theory that the Mississippi's sediment load has contributed to sinking in coastal Louisiana.

The heavy load of ancient sediment is found here because coastal Louisiana was the drainage point for the entire North American ice sheet during much of the last glacial period, about 22,000 years ago, Ivins said.

The massive sediment slug was pushed downriver by advancing glaciers and it is still working its way down the Mississippi each year, researchers said.

Scientists have known for a long time that New Orleans is sinking, but recent advances using Global Positioning System technology and updated geodetic data have deepened the understanding of the geophysical forces at play.

The challenge will be to take what science has to offer to help save New Orleans, said Roy Dokka, executive director of LSU's Center for GeoInformatics and one of the study's researchers.

''We have to build smart. We also have to make sure that we understand what's happening exactly,'' Dokka said. ''If we get the science and engineering right, we can save New Orleans for hundreds of years.''

Measuring how much the land may sink is critical for the Army Corps of Engineers. It is embarking on a massive effort to build up levees and flood defenses around New Orleans and the surrounding region of swamps and marshes that are home to fishermen, Cajun culture and such critical infrastructure as ports and oil refineries.

Factors clouding New Orleans' future are formidable: The sea may rise by 3 feet over the next century because of global warming; hurricanes have destroyed important bulwark-like wetlands and barrier islands; ongoing human activities such as oil extraction are causing land loss; and the building of levees actually speed up subsidence.

Scientists are busy trying to evaluate the risks. That work was helped by Hurricane Katrina, which acted as a catalyst for scientific inquiries.

''I wouldn't say anybody was wandering through the dark before, but there is a better body of knowledge, both big picture and detailed,'' said Ed Link, a University of Maryland engineer who's led corps' efforts to study and improve levee building in the storm's wake.

Global Warming Enters Hurricane Debate

NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- A lively and sometimes scrappy debate on whether global warming is fueling bigger and nastier hurricanes like Katrina is adding an edge to a gathering of forecasters here.

The venue for the 88th annual meeting of the American Meteorological Society could not have been more conducive to the discussion: The Ernest N. Morial Convention Center is where thousands of people waited for days during the storm to be evacuated from a city drowning in water and misery.

Although weather experts generally agree that the planet is warming, they hardly express consensus on what that may mean for future hurricanes. Debate has simmered in hallway chats and panel discussions.

A study released Wednesday by government scientists was the latest point of contention.

The study by researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Miami Lab and the University of Miami postulated that global warming may actually decrease the number of hurricanes that strike the United States. Warming waters may increase vertical wind speed, or wind shear, cutting into a hurricane's strength.

The study focused on observations rather than computer models, which often form the backbone of global warming studies, and on the records of hurricanes over the past century, researchers said.

''I think it was a seminal paper,'' Richard Spinrad, NOAA's assistant administrator for Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, said Wednesday.

''There's a lot of uncertainty in the models,'' Spinrad said. ''There's a lot of uncertainty in what drives the development of tropical cyclones, or hurricanes. What the study says to us is that we need a higher resolution'' of data.

Greg Holland, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said the new paper was anything but seminal. He said ''the results of the study just don't hold together.''

Holland is among scientists who say there is a link between global warming and an upswing in catastrophic storms. He said other factors far outweigh the influence of wind shear on how a storm will behave.

''This is the problem with going in and focusing on one point, a really small change,'' Holland said.

He had a sharp exchange Monday with Christopher Landsea, a NOAA scientist, during the AMS meeting.

While Holland sees a connection between global warming and increased hurricanes, Landsea believes storms only seem to be getting bigger because people are paying closer attention. Big storms that would have gone unnoticed in past decades are now carefully tracked by satellites and airplanes, even if they pose no threat to land.

The exchange, captured by National Public Radio, illustrates how emotional the global warming debate has become for hurricane experts.

''Can you answer the question?'' Landsea demanded.

''I'm not going to answer the question because it's a stupid question,'' Holland shot back.

''OK, let's move on,'' a moderator intervened.

The passion was no surprise to the TV weather forecasters, academic climatologists, government oceanographers and tornado chasers attending the meeting.

''One thing I've learned about coming to this conference over the years is that very few people agree on anything,'' said Bill Massey, a former hurricane program manager at the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

''There's a legitimate scientific debate going on and a healthy one, and scientists right now are trying to defuse the emotion and focus on the research,'' said Robert Henson, the author of ''The Rough Guide to Climate Change.''

Whether global warming is increasing the frequency of major storms or reducing it, Henson said, lives are at stake.

''Let's say you have a drunk driver once an hour going 100 miles an hour in the middle of the night on an interstate,'' Henson said. ''Say you're going to have an increase from once an hour to once every 30 minutes; that's scary and important. But you've got to worry about that drunk driver if it's even once an hour.''

Massey agreed. ''In 1992 we had one major storm. It was Hurricane Andrew. It was a very slow year. But one storm can ruin your day.''