Local editorial on FEMA

[KBCraig]

This is rather surprising for the Texarkana Gazette, which normally leans towards the "conservative Democrat" side: gummint has a solution, they just need the right people. Not this time! I especially like the part I highlighted in bold.

(Please ignore the list's numbering plan. We can't ask too much from this paper, you know!)

If you don't know, we've got 13,000 FEMA trailers piled up around here, empty, gathering dust, waiting for a place to go. Here's what the Gazette had to say about it:

http://texarkanagazette.com/articles/2006/02/12/local_news/opinion/opinions02.txt

What can be done with mobile homes?
Sunday, February 12, 2006 12:52 PM CST

Column By LES MINOR
Managing Editor

There is a sad absurdity to all those mobile homes piling up at the Hope, Ark., airport and the two defense plants west of Texarkana.

It takes something like the aerial photograph that ran Saturday in the Texarkana Gazette, or earlier in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, to put it in perspective. The size of this mess is incomprehensible and the numbers don't do it justice. You'd have to be practically in outer space to get all the trailer houses in one photo frame.

And getting them into the frame may be the easy part. Getting them out of it and to where they will do some good is proving much more tricky.

There are 11,000 at the airport and another 2,000 spread between Red River Army Depot and Lone Star Army Ammunition Plant. These are staging areas for the Federal Emergency Management Agency that ordered 65,000 of these to serve as homes for hurricane evacuees along the Gulf Coast. Very few have made it to where they are needed.

Why FEMA needed staging areas at all is an interesting question. Presumably it gets them out of manufacturers' inventory so they can keep building and getting paid for mobile homes and travel trailers nobody wants.

Maybe it is time to stop building them until someone with some authority decides what to do with the ones they've already accumulated.

Many of the communities that suffered hurricane damage don't want them because they think they'll become ghettos and they will never be able to get rid of them. Some places don't want them on individual lots because they think they'll never go away and become a blemish on rebuilding neighborhoods.

A lot of the people who were displaced by the storms don't want to live in trailers and think they deserve better. (They don't; None of us deserves anything. We earn what we can, and sometimes lose it through no fault of our own. But we have no inalienable entitlements. Sometimes we are lucky and sometimes when disaster strikes the only choice is to rebuild and start over from scratch. That's life.)

And of course, for these mobile homes to be functional they have to be powered and have sewer lines and all that—no easy task for utility companies that are working round the clock to solve a myriad of problems.

So what should we do with all these trailers while they are hanging out in our backyard waiting for proper disposition?

Looking down from above at the sprawl of trailers hibernating in Hope, several ideas come to mind:

1) We could draw giant dots on the roof of all the trailers and create the world's largest domino game. We should be a cinch to make the Guinness Book of World Records.

2) Or if not games, how about art? If you position all those trailers symmetrically and color code them there is great potential to create the largest Navajo bead art ever assembled, far surpassing the intricate patterns you see on belts and leather work. Alien lifeforms studying us from distant galaxies would know we were intelligent and advanced, just the way we know there was superior life on Mars because of the large face that was carved in the sandflats but is no longer there.

When these trailers are finally dispersed, these aliens will decide that we are no longer here or have suddenly become advanced. Either event will be viewed as an improvement and will be followed by first contact.

3) And could we not position these trailers in such a way as to make them the metallic equivalent of crop circles? Let's create landing pads while we are at it.

3) We could turn the airport into the largest migrant worker center in the world. Hope already has one of these. They might as well corner the market.

4) Every Hope child between the age of 8 and 16 ought to have a club house buried in the middle of this sprawl of trailers. Some of you might remember the Three Investigator series of juvenile fiction that came out in the 1970s. The investigator's headquarters was in a trailer house that got buried in an old salvage yard and was then forgotten. Who knows what goes on in the center of this field of trailers?

4) Speaking of which, a lot of Hope teenagers have probably thought it might be worth getting lost in the middle of this mess of trailers with their date. Better than a drive-in movie; more comfortable than making out in the backseat. The possibilities are endless.

5) From the sky, these rectangular boxes look like Little Debbie white iced snack bars, or Tic Tacs lined up in a row by an obsessive-compulsive. Maybe some advertising possibilities? Or a promo for the Monk show?

6) Maybe we should just turn the famed detective loose on this problem. At least all the rows would be even and straight.

7) If we need to establish a profit center with these housing resources, we could arrange the trailers to form a gigantic labyrinth. The owners of the corn mazes that pop up each fall charge about $5 for a waltz through their crop rows. We should get about $10 for a chance to navigate through this housing jungle.

8 ) Finally, maybe we should haul all of these trailers down to the U.S.-Mexico board, put them end-to-end as part of our already-failed border control effort.

The trailers from Hope would create a wall 170 miles long. But if we hauled all 65,000 units down there we could create a 1,000-mile trailer barricade on the border.

Now, this probably wouldn't keep any more illegals out than our standard efforts, but at least they'd have a nice place to stay their first night in our country. First impressions are important.

See, that was easy. In just a few minutes, we've figured out a handful of ways of utilize these trailers in creative and constructive ways. So why can't FEMA?