Rick Jervis
USA TODAY
April 30, 2008
BAY ST. LOUIS, Miss. — Becky Gillette was an unpaid volunteer with the Sierra Club's Mississippi Chapter when she first heard about colleagues waking up in their federally issued trailers with nosebleeds, hacking coughs and headaches.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency had distributed thousands of the aluminum trailers to Gulf Coast residents displaced by the 2005 hurricanes. Gillette heard of babies getting sick and pets, including a co-worker's parakeet, dying in the trailers over several weeks from late 2005 through early 2006.
Drawing on her experience as an activist and journalist, Gillette suspected formaldehyde, a colorless gas used in manufacturing. A colleague had Googled the phrase "testing for formaldehyde" and found a company in Boca Raton, Fla., that would supply test kits and analyze the results. She ordered 32 of the $35 kits and tested trailers along the Gulf Coast. The results were stunning: 30 of the 32 trailers registered unsafe levels of formaldehyde.
"We were shocked," Gillette, 52, says. "We knew then we had a major problem."
The tests were the beginning of a two-year odyssey for Gillette that would propel her through dozens of toxic trailers and the halls of Congress to shed light on a controversial fallout from the 2005 storms: dangerously high levels of formaldehyde in FEMA-issued trailers. A regional weekly newspaper dubbed her "the Erin Brockovich of Formaldehyde," after the consumer advocate who inspired a movie starring Julia Roberts.
The attention Gillette brought to the issue has grown beyond the Gulf Coast. The Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission are reviewing whether more regulation is needed. Starting in 2009, California will enforce strict formaldehyde limits in manufactured wood.
In February, nearly two years after Gillette's first warnings, FEMA and the Centers for Disease Control announced they had found high levels of formaldehyde in trailers and urged residents to vacate them immediately. As of late April, just over 6,000 trailers remained on the Gulf Coast, down from 143,000.
"It certainly has gone up on our priority list," Gina Solomon of the National Resources Defense Council says of formaldehyde. "We didn't take it very seriously initially. Now everyone is certainly taking it seriously."
Journalist turned activist
Raised in southern Idaho, Gillette wanted to become a forest ranger, but a professor at Utah State University talked her into studying journalism. After graduating, she wrote freelance articles, including stories on the dangers of formaldehyde.
"I really liked writing," she says. "But at one point I realized just writing about it wasn't enough." Her writing turned to activism.
As a stay-at-home mother of two in the 1980s, she successfully led opposition to a landfill near her home in Hattiesburg, Miss., and gathered 8,000 signatures to stop a liquid hazardous waste facility.
That desire to push for change led her to test the Gulf Coast trailers.
She shared the results with a local FEMA official but received no response, she says. Using a $4,000 Sierra Club grant, she continued testing.
"For a long time we were just banging our heads against the wall," she says. "Why doesn't anyone want to hear about these test results?"
Since moving into her FEMA-issued trailer in early 2006, Teresa Coggins, 48, a diabetic living in Ocean Springs, Miss., began having nosebleeds and headaches. Coggins took her daily insulin shots but felt increasingly woozy and lethargic, she says. In February 2007, she had what she thought was the flu then slipped into a coma. She was on life support for eight days but later recovered.
That summer, she saw Gillette on a local TV news station and called to get her trailer tested. Results showed higher than acceptable levels of formaldehyde. She moved out of the trailer and her condition improved, she says.
"It was wrong of them to put these people in these trailers to begin with," Coggins says.
Finally on the move
FEMA officials had fielded complaints about formaldehyde but didn't know it was a widespread problem until Gillette's tests became public, says David Garratt, a deputy assistant administrator with FEMA.
Tests taken on behalf of FEMA in 2006 showed high levels of formaldehyde. "In retrospect, we wish we had recognized this faster than we did," Garratt says.
Jesse Fineran was a FEMA manager in charge of mobile homes in Mississippi's Hancock County. In the summer of 2006, he was hearing health complaints from trailer residents. Fineran, 63, tried to inform his supervisors but was told "not to worry about it," he says. He says he was later demoted. FEMA says he is under investigation but would not elaborate.
"They knew the people were suffering," Fineran says.
By summer 2007, Gillette had organized testing of 69 FEMA trailers and mobile homes — 60 of them showed high levels of formaldehyde. That summer, she testified before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. In February, FEMA and the CDC acknowledged that a third of trailers tested contained unacceptably high levels of formaldehyde. Residents would begin to be moved out immediately.
"For the longest time, it looked like they would never admit there was a problem," Gillette says.
|
