In an email sent this July to colleagues, Mary DeVany wrote: “Post Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) issued over 200,000 families travel trailers as temporary living quarters. About 60,000 households affected by Katrina remain in trailers.
“Almost immediately thousands of people began experiencing adverse health effects that we have subsequently traced to high levels of formaldehyde emissions. To date, very little has been done by FEMA to ameliorate this serious health hazard; although in July, in a stunning act of misguided benevolence - government officials proposed using the surplus trailers that hurricane victims vacate to house Native Americans.
“During most of this last year and a half I have been advising the Sierra Club regarding these formaldehyde exposures. On July 19, I testified at a hearing held by the U.S. Congressional Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, chaired by Congressman Henry Waxman (D-CA), on the issues surrounding these FEMA trailers and the subsequent adverse health effects experienced by the hurricane victims living in those trailers.”
“It was quite an experience, I must say,” she described in a follow-up email. “It was my job to be able to explain all the health effects of formaldehyde, how it gets into the materials during the manufacturing process, how to detect and sample for formaldehyde, what all the various exposure limits mean, and how to abate the problem.
“At the hearing, we were sworn in, had five minutes to talk, then each Congressman had five minutes to question us. I practiced my oral testimony so many times during the night before the hearing (I couldn’t sleep at all ) that when my turn to testify came up, rather than being nervous, I think I just went on auto-pilot!
“In the subsequent 24 hours, I got calls for help from a U.S. senator and two congressmen; interviews from news media as varied as The New York Times to the Native American Times; was on CBS, NBC, ABC and all the cable news channels; and was quoted in an article on the front page of the Washington Post (see below) and many, many other papers here in the U.S. as well as Europe. I guess I’ve now had my five (not even 15) minutes of fame!”