Agency Is Under Pressure to Develop Disaster Housing

GULFPORT, Miss. — After the federal government announced in February that it would no longer use travel trailers to house the victims of future disasters, there was an initial sense of relief along the hurricane-scarred Gulf Coast.

The flimsy little white boxes are unpleasant to live in and tainted with toxic formaldehyde fumes. And they cost the federal government billions of dollars.

But that relief quickly turned to exasperation when it became clear that the government did not have an immediate backup plan. Without the trailers, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has no reliable way to rush immediate shelter to thousands of victims of an earthquake, or a wildfire, or another catastrophic hurricane.

Though FEMA is considering several new ideas, including a so-called panelized home partially built at a factory, the agency’s effort to develop a trailer replacement has not impressed many housing experts.

“FEMA seems like a babe in the woods on this stuff,” said John Henneberger, co-director of the Texas Low-Income Housing Information Service, which is working on trailer alternatives. “They seem to be clueless.”

The view in Washington is not much different. “It just sounds like they still don’t know what they’re talking about, to be frank,” said Ronald D. Utt, a senior research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “To say, O.K., we didn’t get it right with trailers so we’ll move on to something more exotic like prefab housing is a bizarre suggestion.”

There are several proposals that FEMA may try in future disasters, including houses made of shipping containers and one that can be shipped flat and unfolded upon delivery. Here in Gulfport, the state has designed and built what are known as the Mississippi Cottages — skinny but sturdy little houses that can be seen lined up by the hundreds in a staging area here.

But while the cottages are the only alternative that has been fully tested and appear popular with those who live in them, they have proved hard to place because of local government resistance. And they were produced through an effort that FEMA may have a hard time replicating.

FEMA is under increasing pressure from Congress to develop disaster housing. Senator Mary L. Landrieu, the Louisiana Democrat who leads a subcommittee on disaster recovery, has begun an investigation into the agency’s policies, and, at a hearing this month, castigated agency officials for failing to develop a strategic plan. Congress had set a deadline for the plan of July 1, 2007; the agency now says it hopes to have one by June 1.

Her goal, Ms. Landrieu said in an e-mail message, is to “make sure the next time a disaster strikes, housing — a basic human need — will be safe for all our families.”

FEMA officials say they are pushing hard to move the last 30,000 families out of temporary housing, most of which is made up of trailers. (There were almost 119,000 trailers in use at the peak.) As the trailers are emptied, they will probably be sold for scrap, said David Garratt, acting assistant administrator for disaster assistance at FEMA.

As for the pace of the hunt for a replacement, “we recognize, to some extent, this is an urgent need,” Mr. Garratt said. “But we don’t want to treat disaster victims as guinea pigs.”

In the meantime, FEMA is planning to order formaldehyde-free mobile homes and a little-used mini-mobile home, called a “park model,” to house disaster victims. But it is far harder to find sites for the bigger units; last fall, for example, the agency had more than 57,000 trailers in use along the Gulf Coast, but fewer than 7,000 mobile homes, and only 1,600 park units.

After the California wildfires last fall, FEMA was able to install only 50 mobile homes; it found them hard to transport on winding roads and hard to install on steep sites, said Jack Schuback, who runs the agency’s joint housing solutions group.

Many experts have long urged FEMA to work closely with federal housing officials to find existing apartments for disaster victims, rather than focus on trailers. The agency insists that it does so whenever possible, although its efforts along those lines in New Orleans and Mississippi have been roundly criticized. But after a disaster like Hurricane Katrina, there was no existing housing nearby.

Relocating families might mean sending them far from their jobs and the houses they hope to rebuild.

One of FEMA’s criteria in evaluating trailer alternatives is that they have a smaller footprint than mobile homes, Mr. Schuback said.

The agency is also looking for housing that can accommodate families and people with disabilities, that can be delivered quickly, that can be installed in different environments, and that will not be too costly. The travel trailers cost as little as $11,000 apiece, but installing and maintaining them averaged $30,000, and sometimes far more, according to the Government Accountability Office.

Using a lengthy checklist, FEMA has evaluated about 66 proposals, Mr. Schuback said, and visited 37 sites. But only half a dozen have been deemed promising enough to try during a disaster.

“I want to emphasize that we have not yet found the golden unit that will solve all disaster housing,” he said. “The process has ruled out far more units than it has yielded.”

The agency is being cagey about which proposals made the cut, but it did say that it is evaluating two that are being tried by states under a $400 million pilot project that Congress required FEMA to undertake in June 2006.

Texas is supposed to try the panelized home. It has signed a contract with an international company called Heston, but none of the houses have been built.

The only units FEMA says it is planning to test are the Mississippi Cottages, which have tin roofs, small porches and are colored like Easter eggs — rose-hip pink, malted mint, cloudless blue. The cottages are on wheels, but the larger models can be put on permanent foundations. All are equipped with appliances, beds, a table and chairs, ceiling fans, even pots and pans, and cost an average of $32,000 apiece to build.

With its built-in closets and spacious kitchen cupboards, their cottage feels like a mansion, said Vicki Ladner Meshell and her husband, Rickey, whose apartment in Long Beach was washed away by Hurricane Katrina’s storm surge.

“We love it — except when all four of us are trying to get ready at once,” Ms. Meshell said of the little aqua-colored cottage, which her family eventually hopes to buy. The cottage is rent-free, although they pay $210 a month for the trailer site, plus utilities.

The Mississippi Emergency Management Agency has installed more than 2,000 of them throughout southern Mississippi, and plans to put in 3,500.

But local governments in Mississippi have resisted the cottages. They fear people who get cottages will simply live in them and not rebuild their houses, said Mike Womack, executive director of the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency.

“They’re too nice,” he said. “I’ve heard this over and over again.”

Corps' levee projects on the hot seat

Residents of Jefferson and St. Charles parishes questioned Army Corps of Engineers officials Thursday about a $1 billion plan to raise hurricane protection levees in both parishes.

At the public hearing at the East Bank Regional Library in Metairie, residents questioned the corps' plans, which involve building a new floodwall on the Jefferson-St. Charles Parish line, and raising the levees along the Lake Pontchartrain shoreline to heights ranging from 15 feet to 17.5 feet and armoring the front of the levee with a low floodwall.

The purpose of the hearing was to get public input on the environmental effects of the proposed projects, though residents in attendance were primarily concerned about the levees' effectiveness.

Ryan Crais of Kenner asked why the corps chose the floodwall along the parish line canal, also known as the West Return Canal.

"I thought the waves against that wall were going to shake my house apart," he said, referring to the storm surge during Hurricane Katrina. "Let the waves break on the other side, not right against the wall."

He wanted the corps to instead build an earthen levee along the canal, an alternative corps officials said was considered.

But Stuart Waits, the corps project manager for that job, said the soil in the marshy area is not stable enough to hold a levee. Instead, a new floodwall will be built about 35 feet west of the existing floodwall, which was constructed in a less stable I configuration. The new wall will be built in the shape of an upside down T for extra stability, he said.

On the 10-mile stretch of lakefront levee between the canal and the Orleans Parish line, corps officials say a 6-foot-high breakwater at the shoreline is needed because when the original lakefront levees were built in the 1960s, the shoreline was about 200 feet farther away. The breakwater would help keep the shoreline from encroaching on the levee.

Fran Campbell, executive director of the East Jefferson Levee District, said she had lobbied the corps to move the breakwater farther north to reclaim some of that land lost to the lake, but was turned down.

A major part of the East Jefferson project will be to build 17-foot-high floodwalls around the outflows of the parish's four major lakefront pump stations to prevent them from becoming the Achilles' heels of the protection system.

Under the design being considered, the pumps would continue to operate during a storm, pumping rainwater into the lake through openings in the walls or over the walls. But should the power fail, the discharge pipes would be mechanically sealed.

Metairie resident Don Neubeck complained that the shutoff systems would have to be operated manually and that automatic shutoffs should be used to prevent the surge from moving backward through the pumps after a power failure.

"That's the weak link in the system," he said.

Senior Project Manager Carl Anderson said that point would be considered before the design was completed.

In St. Charles Parish, the levees would be raised to between 13 feet and 15 feet. The corps has decided its best bet is to widen the base of the levee by about 300 feet to handle the extra height. The corps had considered placing an extra layer of geotextile fabric on the levee, which would have allowed it to build up the elevation on its existing base.

The public review period for the St. Charles levee, known as IER1, will run from April 1 through May 1. The west return canal floodwall comment period will run from April 8 to May 8. That project is called IER2. The comment period for the Lake Pontchartrain levee plan, known as IER3, will run from April 21 through May 21.

A final decision date for the three projects are tentatively set for May 19, 22 and 28, respectively.

FEMA Slammed for Using Toxic Trailers

FEMA, already a dirty word along the Gulf Coast, has taken another hit to its reputation.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency came under new withering criticism Thursday after tests found dangerous levels of formaldehyde fumes in many of the trailers the agency used to house hurricane victims in Louisiana and Mississippi.

''This is such gross incompetence. I really have not in my 10 years seen anything like this on the domestic front,'' said U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La.

FEMA Administrator R. David Paulison said Thursday the agency would rush to find temporary housing for roughly 35,000 families now in its trailers. ''We're moving as fast as we can,'' he said.

The agency was forced to act after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that formaldehyde fumes from hundreds of trailers and mobile homes were, on average, about five times what people are exposed to in most modern homes.

Formaldehyde, a preservative commonly used in construction materials, can lead to breathing problems and is also believed to cause cancer.

Critics, already angered at FEMA for its performance after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita struck in 2005, faulted the agency for not responding sooner to concerns from storm victims that its trailers could be jeopardizing the health of occupants.

''It is simply inexcusable for FEMA to have a one to two year delay in addressing the serious health issues of these men and women along the Gulf Coast who have already suffered from the devastation of the 2005 hurricanes,'' said Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a Republican.

''When the health of our people and our children and our families is at stake we cannot afford to wait, we cannot decide that we have to do more studies and conduct further analysis,'' he said.

Paulison said he hoped to have everyone out of trailers and into hotels, motels, apartments and other temporary housing by the summer, when the heat and stuffy air could worsen the problem inside the trailers.

Louisiana has 25,162 occupied FEMA trailers and mobile homes, while Mississippi has 10,362, according to FEMA. Other states also have hundreds of trailers. At one point, FEMA had placed victims of the 2005 hurricanes in more than 144,000 trailers and mobile homes.

In an interview with The Associated Press after Thursday's briefing, Paulison acknowledged he could have done a better job of expressing sympathy for storm victims.

''I didn't want to get sappy out there in front of the cameras,'' he said, ''but the truth is that we really do care and we really are working hard to take care of the people's needs and get them out of these travel trailers and mobile homes.''

CDC Director Dr. Julie Gerberding said the center's tests could not draw a direct link between formaldehyde levels and the wide range of ailments reported by trailer occupants. But the CDC urged people to move out as quickly as possible.

Lynette Hooks, a trailer resident, was outraged at FEMA. Since she began living in her trailer outside her damaged New Orleans home in October 2006, she said she has suffered headaches and sinus problems, in addition to the asthma she had before.

''Am I angry at FEMA? Of course I am. They should have started moving people out of these trailers once they first started finding problems,'' said Hooks, 48.

The CDC findings could also have disturbing implications for the safety of other trailers and mobile homes across the country, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Thursday on Capitol Hill. But the CDC study did not look beyond the FEMA housing.

Paulison vowed that the agency would never again use the flimsy, cramped travel trailers to shelter victims of disasters. Mobile homes are generally roomier than trailers and considered less susceptible to buildups of fumes.

FEMA will press ahead with plans to supply leftover, never-used mobile homes from the twin disasters to victims of last week's tornadoes in the South, Paulison said. But the mobile homes will be opened up, aired out and tested first, he said.

State finds glitches on Road Home buyout list

BATON ROUGE -- The state agency that handles Road Home buyouts has made surprising discoveries during recent visits to more than 5,000 hurricane-damaged properties -- chief among them a smattering of dismayed homeowners who insisted they never sold their houses to the recovery program.

Contractors for the Louisiana Land Trust, which is responsible for landscaping and otherwise maintaining properties under the Road Home's control, also have stumbled upon lots still harboring occupied FEMA trailers, as well as some commercial buildings at the addresses provided in spreadsheets by the state's Office of Community Development, land trust Executive Director Nadine Jarmon said Tuesday. Commercial buildings aren't eligible for Road Home grants.

Glitches have arisen in about 5 percent of the 5,000 cases, and Jarmon traced the root of the problem to a more fundamental issue: Despite having to maintain buyout properties, the land trust has not received a single complete set of closing documents for any of the 5,161 properties that the state says it owns. Other problems could arise soon if the system is not streamlined, Jarmon told the Louisiana Recovery Authority board during its monthly meeting at Baton Rouge Community College.

Right now, we're basically taking their word that we own them," she said in an interview. "From here, the problem just kind of escalates, it dominoes."

The uncertainty about ownership status holds up various initiatives, Jarmon said. For instance, she said she has been working with federal officials to figure out whether the land trust can secure subsidies, either through FEMA's Public Assistance program or the Increased Cost of Compliance option of former owners' flood insurance policies, to cover some of the cost of demolishing buyout properties. Tapping either source would require proof of ownership, she said.

"For me, the big picture is you've got to be able to show ownership if you're going to advocate for any action on behalf of those properties," she said.

Documents in doubt

More important, without title documents, the land trust cannot turn over buyout properties to parish redevelopment authorities that are expected to return them to commerce, Jarmon said. Current estimates peg the eventual number of Road Home buyout properties in the range of 11,000 to 15,000, with at least 6,000 expected to end up in the hands of the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority.

"If we don't have our ownership documents, then there's something fundamentally wrong here," she said. "At some point, we just got to get it together."

A spokeswoman for the state Office of Community Development said that all sale and covenant documents for the transfer of Road Home buyouts are recorded at the parish level, while subcontractors handling closings for ICF, the state vendor running the grant program, are responsible for pulling together closing documents.

Spokeswoman GeGe Roulaine said that for the past several months, her department and ICF have been working with the land trust to put in place a computer system that will allow subcontractors to upload scanned images of all closing documents to a shared drive accessible by all parties. The process cannot be implemented fully, however, until the land trust finishes installing its own new computer system at its Baton Rouge offices, she said.

The land trust "did not want any paper documents. They wanted everything given to them only in digital," Roulaine said. "Until they're done developing their (computer management information system), we have to go with this temporary system of spreadsheets."

But in an interview, land trust consultant Terrie Walton responded: "Our computer systems are ready and our server is in place. We just need closing documents."
Rechecking information

Jarmon said the land trust is ready to accept the documents, adding that she has been lobbying quietly for access to complete closing records for the past three months. She is expected to make her case today at 10 a.m. during a hearing of the state Senate's Local and Municipal Affairs Committee.

In the meantime, Jarmon said she wants spreadsheets compiled by the state community development office to be scrubbed -- with a new check on the accuracy of the property status information.

"The issue has been (in) the accuracy of the information that we get from OCD," she said. "Right now we have properties (on our list) that have FEMA trailers on them. We have people who are still living on the property who say they were told at the closing that they can stay."

The land trust said it found 156 properties with FEMA trailers, some of which were occupied. It said it could find no lot to correspond with more than 40 addresses on the state spreadsheet.

Another OCD spokeswoman, Laura Robertson, said simple typographical mistakes likely are to blame for erroneous addresses on spreadsheets that led land trust contractors to properties that were not sold to the state through the Road Home. As for several residents who, according to Jarmon, told land trust contractors that Road Home officials said they could continue living at their properties after agreeing to a buyout, "that has never been our policy," Robertson said. "They have to vacate immediately."

FEMA Looks at Trains for Evacautions

NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- The Federal Emergency Management Agency may expand the use of passenger trains to evacuate the sick and elderly in advance of hurricanes across the Gulf Coast, a FEMA official said.

Glenn Cannon, a FEMA assistant administrator, told a congressional subcommittee meeting in New Orleans on Monday that his agency is looking at passenger trains as a method of getting people out of harm's way.

After Hurricane Katrina hit in August 2005, Amtrak was hired to be on hand to evacuate people with special needs if another disaster hit. Cannon said FEMA is now devising disaster plans for other Gulf Coast cities based on the New Orleans model.

''We're changing our whole planning focus now from Louisiana-centric to Gulf Coast-centric,'' Cannon told the subcommittee.

But, he said, turning railways into evacuation routes won't be easy.

Rights of way for most railroads are privately owned by freight companies, and there is no congressional mandate to use railroads for evacuations. Also, the existing stock of passenger cars cannot accommodate evacuees unable to walk, he said.

Katrina Nursing Home Case Costly for La.

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) -- Louisiana taxpayers paid more than $360,000 for the failed prosecution of the owners of a nursing home where 35 people died during Hurricane Katrina, according to documents obtained Friday by The Associated Press.

The money spent by former state Attorney General Charles Foti include nearly $82,000 for lessons in jury selection and advice on running the trial, the documents show.

Sal and Mabel Mangano owned St. Rita's Nursing Home in St. Bernard Parish, which was flooded by the hurricane that hit Aug. 29, 2005. Prosecutors said they should have evacuated the home, and they charged the couple with 35 counts of negligent homicide and 24 counts of cruelty to the elderly or infirm.

A jury took less than four hours to find the couple not guilty after the 2 1/2-week trial.
''This is a colossal waste of taxpayers' money on a case that should never have come to trial,'' said James Cobb, one of the lawyers who represented the Manganos.
Foti, now in private practice with a New Orleans law firm, did not immediately return a call for comment Friday.

Foti's office drew heavy criticism for prosecuting the Manganos and, in a separate case, prosecuting a doctor and two nurses for the post-hurricane deaths of nine patients at a New Orleans hospital. An accounting of the expenses from that case is not yet available.

Foti has repeatedly denied accusations that he used the trials to grandstand for his re-election bid. He lost last fall's Republican primary, and Democrat Buddy Caldwell became the new attorney general in a runoff election.

The initial expense figures in the Mangano case, provided by Caldwell's office, include $81,533 to Courtroom Sciences Inc., the company that instructed the assistant district attorneys who conducted the trial on jury selection, opening statements and trial tactics.

Other expenses include $58,401 for hurricane expert Brian Jarvinen, $72,018.82 to psychiatry professor Robert Stall and $52,607 to Dr. Stanford Finkel, a gerontologist.
It was not clear from the documents how Jarvinen, Stall and Finkel aided the prosecution.

In the hospital case, Foti led investigations that resulted in the arrests of cancer specialist Dr. Anna Pou and nurses Lori Budo and Cheri Landry, who worked at the flooded Memorial Medical Center after the storm.

A grand jury last year refused to indict Pou. Landry and Budo testified before the panel under immunity and were not indicted.

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.''