The Katrina chronicles: Formaldehyde-laced trailers set to claim another set of victims

Richard Denison, Ph.D., is a Senior Scientist.

The Washington Post ran a front-page article Saturday, written by Spencer Hsu, which reported the auction sale by FEMA of most of the 120,000 notorious formaldehyde-tainted trailers it had purchased five years ago to house the victims of Hurricane Katrina.

The article cites FEMA as saying that “wholesale buyers from the auction must sign contracts attesting that trailers will not be used, sold or advertised as housing, and that trailers will carry a sticker saying, ‘Not to be used for housing’.”

Think that’s likely to be enough? 

Think again. Consider this excerpt from a consumer alert issued by the Attorney General of Arkansas, Dustin McDaniel: “Proceed with caution, extreme caution, if you are tempted to respond to what appears to be an attractive offer for a travel trailer or manufactured home.” He and others pointed to the high likelihood that the trailers will now enter a market where they may be sold and resold repeatedly and the warning label removed or ignored.

Hsu cites one woman who several years ago purchased a trailer for her son – days before all the publicity broke about dangerous levels of formaldehyde. Now she’s worried about him keeping the trailer, but also has qualms about selling it to someone else. “This is like history repeating itself," she said. "People are all going to buy them, move into them and then start getting sick."

Some buyers appear to have fewer qualms: The highest bidder for the FEMA trailers says he already has buyers – retailers who intend to resell the trailers – for the 15,000 units he bought at auction, adding that formaldehyde is a “non-topic” that his buyers don’t even ask about.

This story vividly illustrates just how enduring the lifecycles of dangerous chemicals can be when our policies let chemicals get so deeply embedded into commerce without requiring they be shown to be safe.

It’s not an isolated incident. In another recent front page Washington Post article, Lyndsay Layton documented the difficulties faced by the food industry in trying to replace a chemical used to make the lining used inside virtually every food can sold in America. That chemical is bisphenol A (BPA) – a hormone-like compound which is found in the bodies of 93% of the American public, and is now suspected of interfering with human reproduction and early development. Some 6 billion pounds of BPA are produced annually.

But back to formaldehyde, an estimated 46 billion pounds of which are made annually.

TSCA shares the blame

A year ago, in the House of Representatives’ first oversight hearing on the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) in decades, I testified about how the structural flaws in this 34-year-old law played a key role in allowing those FEMA trailers to be built and to deliver a second knock-out blow to Katrina victims.

The FEMA trailers were made using plywood imported from China. That plywood is made using adhesives that release high levels of formaldehyde, a known human carcinogen. China makes a low-formaldehyde product for export to Europe and Japan, and even for domestic use in China, because in those markets there are regulatory limits in place. But they have a ready market here in the U.S. for the cheaper, more dangerous plywood because we have no such restrictions. That plywood ended up in the FEMA trailers – and continues to be solid into countless other markets across the country.

In 2008, the U