More than 1,000 families wait for trailers in wrecked parish

CHALMETTE, La. — It has been nearly a year since Hurricane Katrina hit, and Janice Tambrella still does not have a home. She doesn't even have a trailer of her own.

Tambrella is currently jammed in with 10 other people in a trailer delivered to a luckier relative. Sleeping on the floor, living out of cars surrounded by overgrown grass and storm-felled trees, she sighs, "I need a place to stay."

Nearly 1,200 St. Bernard Parish families are still waiting to get into trailers that sit locked on their home sites but need utilities or other services; an additional 400 families waiting for trailers have none at all, the Federal Emergency Management Agency said.

St. Bernard Parish President Henry "Junior" Rodriguez is often the one people go to for help. Although he doesn't have the authority to get trailers for them, they figure it's worth asking him since countless calls to FEMA have failed to help.

"The trailer situation is ridiculous," he said.

In this parish adjoining New Orleans, virtually no one was spared massive flooding from the storm surge and breaks in the flood-control system; all but a handful of the 27,000 homes belonging to mostly working-class residents were inundated. Very few have been repaired yet.

FEMA spokesman Aaron Walker said that he understands people are frustrated with the wait but that workers are filling requests as fast as they can. He notes the agency has provided housing assistance to more than 900,000 people regionwide since the Aug. 29 storm. Most years, the agency handles only 2,000 to 3,000 people.

"If you look at the sheer numbers, we've been very successful," he said.

While some people wait and hope, others in the parish say they're having trouble getting rid of trailers they no longer need.

Kathie Acosta lived in a trailer while fixing up a house that got 2 feet of water.

Walker said it takes time to remove trailers because the same workers setting them up are the ones taking them away. He said workers can't simply haul an unused trailer to another site.

But in some cases, Rodriguez is doing just that, even though it's illegal. When warned by a FEMA official that he could get in trouble, the blunt, profanity-prone leader challenged the agency to jail him.

He said he has no choice.

"We're not like New Orleans. We don't have alternate places for them to live," said Rodriguez, noting that at least 20 percent of New Orleans was spared flooding while none of his parish was.

He recently had an unused trailer picked up from the property of someone who no longer wanted it and had it taken to Jack and Mary Badinger's home.

The disabled couple — she's blind and he lost part of a foot in an industrial accident — had been trying to get a trailer since shortly after the storm so they could begin working on their house, which was flooded and slicked by oil.

"I called probably every week," Mary Badinger said. "Everybody you talked to, no one knew nothing."