All Blog Posts from Primary Source

Patience with FEMA is running thin up there at the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. In a three page letter sent today to FEMA Director Henry Paulison, Mary Landrieu (D-LA) and Ted Stevens (R-AK) express their “disappointment” with the agency over the testing for formaldehyde that is not happening on the many thousands of FEMA trailers on the Gulf Coast. See the letter here.

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Three weeks after FEMA held its now infamous fake press conference, and less than three weeks after Primary Source asked the question, a second rolled...sort of... in the FEMA press office. Aaron Walker resigned his position as national spokesman for the agency on Wednesday.

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Pat Philbin, the now former director of external affairs for FEMA, told CBS News that he should have stopped the press conference that the agency held last week without any media present.
“I should have cancelled it quickly. I did not have good situational awareness of what was happening,” he told CBS News in a telephone interview.

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Pat Philbin, the now former director of external affairs for FEMA, told CBS News that he should have stopped the press conference that the agency held last week without any media present.
“I should have cancelled it quickly. I did not have good situational awareness of what was happening,” he said. Philbin who himself was heard off-camera asking Vice Admiral Harvey Johnson, his boss, a question, said he feels terrible about what happened.

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By Michael Rey and Laura Strickler

On Saturday the Director of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff was pretty clear how he felt about the Potemkin press conference held last Tuesday at FEMA:

"I have made it unambiguously clear, in Anglo-Saxon prose, that it is not to ever happen again and there will be appropriate disciplinary action taken against those people who exhibited what I regard as extraordinarily poor judgment.”

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By our count tonight marks the seventh piece we’ve done on Katrina – Two Years Later. We made a total of about two dozen trips to Louisiana and Mississippi in the last nine months, telling stories ranging from formaldehyde in travels trailers – and FEMA’s response to it – to stories about a growing mental health problem among children, to Rodney Freeman’s battle with insurance companies to get his house rebuilt, to the raw emotion felt by hurricane survivors to being left out of President Bush’s State of the Union address.

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The FBI has raided the office of a company owned by the wife of Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour's nephew. Rosemary Barbour's firm Alcatec LLC has a large contract with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to maintain thousands of travel trailers housing residents displaced by hurricane Katrina. There is no evidence that Governor Barbour is involved with the company.

Rosemary Barbour is married to Charles Barbour, the nephew of the Governor and himself a county supervisor. A spokesman at the FBI field office in Jackson Mississippi would not comment on the ongoing investigation but said agents had conducted a "court approved" search of a business late Thursday.

Though local Gulf Coast media has reported that Alcatec received more than $28 million in contracts from FEMA to maintain the trailers, CBS News has discovered this contract which shows that Alcatec was awarded a five year contract that amounted to $299,376,647 in January 2006.

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On tonight's Evening News, we reported another startling development: FEMA knew a year ago about the high levels of formaldehyde in the trailers used by victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

How do we know? CBS News obtained this internal FEMA document produced by FEMA's own employee safety department. They tested 28 trailers and found at least 20 had levels of formaldehyde higher than the EPA's recommended workplace limit.

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Terry Slone, a former employee of Gulf Stream Coach, spoke to CBS News outside of the factory in Indiana where he says the company built tens of thousands of travel trailers, part of a half a billion dollars contract with FEMA. As he told us in our story, he saw and smelled what he said were poor quality wood products coming into the factory on pallets and leaving the factory as cabinets and flooring in the travel trailers. He installed much of it himself.

But as you will hear , Slone also thinks he may have gotten sick from the same formaldehyde fumes that could also be making residents of the trailers in the Gulf sick.

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When the Investigative Unit heard that some of the more than 144,000 trailers used by FEMA for temporary housing across the Gulf could be making people sick, the first thing we did was file a Freedom of Information Act Request with FEMA. We wanted to know what FEMA knew and when they were aware that formaldehyde might be a factor in the air quality of the trailers and the health of the people inside.

We filed the FOIA on March 30 and yesterday (May 15) as were editing this story for air we received an envelope stuffed with documents from the agency. Here is one that we found fascinating.

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