FEMA Disaster Housing: From Sheltering to Permanent Housing
"For over three decades the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has
provided temporary housing assistance to eligible victims of natural disasters.
FEMA has responded to more than a thousand disaster and emergency events over this period, employing a number of options for meeting the needs of people who have lost their primary housing as a result of a disaster declared by the President. The cycle of help from sheltering provided by local organizations in the immediate aftermath, to the eventual repair and rebuilding or replacement of private homes and rental units, is the focus of this report.

Because of the historic nature of the Hurricane Katrina disaster, much of FEMA’s work has been defined and measured by its response to that event. Katrina was an outlier in scope and not representative of disasters declared, on almost a weekly basis, over the last 30 years. But Katrina highlighted the gaps in FEMA’s housing authorities, raised questions regarding the agency’s leadership in exercising existing authorities, and provoked an examination of the flexibility, or
lack thereof, in the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act and its implementing regulations..."

LAWMAKERS RESPOND TO REPORT ON FORMALDEHYDE IN FEMA TRAILERS
"A report released Thursday by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)’s Inspector General found that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) did not act quickly or effectively when it became aware that trailers housing survivors of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita may have had elevated levels of formaldehyde. In a letter sent to FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate, a bipartisan group of lawmakers asked him to implement the report’s recommendations without delay and report back to Congress in 90 days.

The report, FEMA Responses to Formaldehyde in Trailers (OIG-09-83), was required by an amendment passed by the Senate to the DHS Appropriations Act for FY 2008 that was sponsored by Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman Joe Lieberman, ID-Conn; Subcommittee on Disaster Recovery Chairman Mary Landrieu, D-La; Committee Members Mark Pryor, D-Ark, Senator Claire McCaskill, D-Mo; and Senator John Kerry, D-Mass.
The report details how FEMA spent a year deciding how best to ventilate the trailers, only to come to the same conclusion that had been reached long before, and how FEMA dragged its feet on testing the occupied trailers, acting only after senior DHS management became involved. Even after the decision was made to begin testing, FEMA caused months of delay by failing to promptly produce the necessary paperwork and telling the contractor to hold off on testing until it had decided how to respond publicly to the test results. Because of these missteps, FEMA did not have test results of formaldehyde levels in occupied trailers until almost two years after becoming aware of potential problems..."

Learning from Katrina: Conservators' First-Person Accounts of Response and Recovery; Suggestions for Best Practice
"After Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast of Mississippi and Louisiana in 2005, several organized groups sent conservators to help assess the damage created at many cultural institutions. Several federal agencies sent employees to evaluate federal sites, and training programs sent staff and students to help where needed...

On April 20 and 21, 2006 the Library of Congress Preservation Directorate, in collaboration with FLICC and the American Folklife Center interviewed ten of the volunteers in “Capturing Katrina: Collections-Recovery Experiences: Oral Histories of the First Preservers.” The interviews with the recovery volunteers are now available through this website."