National FEMA Trailer Tour

March 26, Ithaca NY - Cornell University (with Finding Our Folk and the Gulf Coast Fund)

Following a KRV “open house,” veteran activists from 3 of the region’s most marginalized black communities will share valuable insights from the recovery’s front lines. Pam Dashiell of the Lower 9th Ward’s Holy Cross Neighborhood Association (New Orleans), Rev. James Black of the Center for Environmental and Economic Justice (East Biloxi), and Derrick Christopher Evans of Turkey Creek Community Initiatives (Gulfport) will shed light on the Coast’s central but overlooked interplay between housing, environmental and economic justice. A student “sleep out” - in solidarity with those who are homeless, displaced or poisoned with formaldehyde - will follow.

March 27, Ithaca NY - Cornell University (continued)

As part of the Finding Our Folk Tour, the Hot 8 brass band will hook up again with the KRV Express and Gulf Coast community activists for a day of education, advocacy and cultural expression. Infused with the joy, pain and hope of untold ancestors and survivors, our universal message of justice, healing and community empowerment will rock y’all’s world when expressed through the music, words and energy distinct to our folks’ Gulf Coast neighborhoods. The prize? Informed student activists committed to transforming places where social justice and community renewal remain but a Dream.

March 28, Hartford CT - District Office of US Senator Chris Dodd

The KRV Express will greet Connecticut recovery volunteers, displaced hurricane survivors and gulf coast advocates at First Presbyterian Church (near Dodd’s office) for a 2-5 pm “open house” and speak-out to support passage of the Gulf Coast Housing Recovery Act of 2007, also known as Senate Bill 1668. Previously approved by the US House of Representatives, this important legislation remains stalled in the US Senate’s Banking, Housing and Community Development Committee, which Senator Dodd chairs. Please contact Dodd to urge his support for this bill.

March 29, Brooklyn NY - Park Slope fundraiser for Gulf Coast Fund

New Orleans community organizer Angela Winfrey-Bowman of the Peoples’ Institute for Survival and Beyond and fellow GCF Advisor Derrick Christopher Evans will be on hand for an afternoon gathering to benefit the Gulf Coast Fund for Community Renewal and Ecological Health. Developed and driven by grassroots leaders from the region, the Gulf Coast Fund continues to make the recovery’s most insightful and impactful grants to community based nonprofits working on the social and environmental justice issues exacerbated by Katrina, Rita and inequitable recovery trends. Contact aducmanis@rockpa.org if you are interested in attending this fundraising house party.

March 30, Manhattan NY - Middle Collegiate Church (East Village)

For the KRV Express’ first visit to the Big Apple, our FEMA trailer will set up on the west side of Second Avenue, between 6th & 7th Streets (map), for a round of innovative and interactive education and advocacy. Throughout the day, the sidewalk and our FEMA Trailer will serve as the stage for street theater that will inform and motivate concrete responses to A Disaster that Keeps on Giving. At 4 pm, an indoor program at Middle Church will feature gospel music and recent Gulf Coast video, as well as community activists Angela Winfrey-Bowman of the Peoples Institute for Survival and Beyond and Derrick Christopher Evans of Turkey Creek Community Initiatives.

April 01, Atlanta GA - Spelman College, with Finding Our Folk and the Gulf Coast Fund

The KRV Express will roll into Atlanta with Finding Our Folk for an empowering exchange between students, displaced storm survivors and human rights activists working for justice and recovery across KatrinaRitaVille. Spelman students will hold an all-day “open house” with the FEMA Trailer before transforming it at nightfall into an outdoor theater on the campus green. New Orleans native and culturalist Mike Molina will join Derrick Christopher Evans of Turkey Creek Community Initiatives in screening a collage of short videos depicting the community recovery and justice issues prevalent in today’s Gulf Coast and diaspora. A student “sleep-out” - in solidarity with those who remain homeless and displaced - will follow.

April o2, Atlanta GA - Spelman College (continued)

New Orleans’ Hot 8 Brass Band, Latosha Brown of the Saving Ourselves Coalition, Angela Winfrey-Bowman of the Peoples Institute for Survival and Beyond, and Tanya Williams of the US Human Rights Network will be on hand for a second day of student and community empowerment through gulf coast cultural and activist education. Dr. Robert D. Bullard of neighboring Clark Atlanta University, Father of the Environmental Justice Movement, will be presented with honorary keys to the KatrinaRitaVille Express.

April 03, Tallahassee FL - Florida A&M, with Finding Our Folk

April 04, Tallahassee FL - Florida A&M University (continued)

April 05, Memphis TN - “Dream Reborn” Conference, with Finding Our Folk

To mark the 4oth Anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, the KRV Express will roll with the Hot 8 and other friends to this unique environmental and economic summit. Placing the Gulf’s poor, poisoned and hurricane-wracked communities at the very center of climate change discourse and policy is an unmistakable “call” that King himself would say reflects the indivisibility of justice made obvious by Katrina and Rita. Save for Appalachian coal country, what region’s people, environment and culture have paid as high a price for our nation’s addiction to carbon-based fuel? For global warming? Not by any stretch does the recovery of Big Oil instead of people resemble the road to King’s “Promised Land.”

April 06, Memphis TN - “Dream Reborn” Conference (continued)

April 10, Turkey Creek MS - Open House and Fish Fry for Survivors, Friends and Funders

The KRV Express will be on hand for an afternoon of fellowship, fun and fried fish in the historic and multi-challenged Turkey Creek community of Gulfport. Community members, social justice advocates and “equitable recovery” funders will experience the unique culture, environment and resilience that has made this tiny community so instructive for local and regional recovery discourse.

April 12, New Orleans LA - “V to the Tenth” (including march to the Super Dome)

The KRV Express will join some 14,000 women at the Super Dome for the 1oth anniversary of V-Day, an international movement to end violence against women and girls. Also down with “V to the Tenth’s” special celebration of our Gulf Coast sistahs, the KRV Express will roll “pink” into NOLA with several of it’s Mamas, including Sharon Alexis of Katrina’s House of Care, Shana Griffin of the New Orleans Women’s Health Clinic, Sharon Hanshaw of Coastal Women for Change and Colette Pichon-Battle of Moving Forward Gulf Coast.

April 16, Philadelphia PA - Democratic Presidential Debate

The KRV Express will again attempt to address the disturbing silence of debate moderators and presidential candidates regarding the Gulf Coast’s slow and wayward recovery. Come roll with us down streets where the US Constitution was ordained and established for We The People - not We the Department of HUD; We the Army Corp, or We the Greedy Profiteers, but We The People Who Still Await A Full and Fair Recovery.

April 21-22, New Orleans - North American Leaders Summit

Vaguely recalling that the Gulf Coast is part of the Union, President Bush feels drawn again by the French Quarter. Though we’d prefer the lower 9th Ward or Coden AL, the KRV Express will be in downtown NOLA to help him show Canadian and Mexican leaders just how far our region has recovered. Either our formaldehyde cloud or the homeless camps beneath I-10 should convey the State of Our Union. As NAFTA allies, they may even send aid. We always knew our President would come up with something to help theGulf Coast’s People.

Gulf coast FEMA Trailers are a form of violence whose cramped, poisoned and emotionally depressed survivors include thousands of women and girls. This is why the KRV Express appeared in Saturday afternoon’s Jumpin’ in the Pink second-line march from New Orleans’ Ashe Cultural Arts Center to historic Congo Square. After rolling up Rampart Street behind the New Birth and Free Agents brass bands, our traveling FEMA Trailer set up at Louis Armstrong Park for the marchers - including V-Day founder Eve Ensler - to check out the inside. The Jumpin’ in the Pink march was a kick off for the Katrina Warriors’ Festival, a 4-week celebration of the creativity, activism and courage of New Orleans and Gulf Coast women. The festival will culminate at the Super Dome on April 11-12 with V to the Tenth, an international gathering aimed at ending violence against women and girls - including the violence which Katrina, Rita and the Gulf region’s unjust “recovery” continue to manifest.

Let’s be honest. The scores of thousands of gulf coast families residing in toxic aluminum boxes during the past two and a half years have been the victims of federally funded violence against US citizens. Hardly a human rights champion, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour observed in May 2007, “if we took the convicts in Parchman (state penitentiary) and put them into those FEMA trailers, they’d sue us for cruel and inhuman treatment – and win.”

Whether it’s been FEMA’s documented pattern of concealing its own concerns about formaldehyde, or an average cost exceeding $70,000 per unit– every FEMA trailer currently or previously housing a gulf coast storm survivor is a crime scene. This is one reason for the agency’s mad rush to get the 38,000 families still stuck in them out before this summer (but not necessarily into safer or affordable housing). With rents across the region rising daily, FEMA’s fellow federal prankster, HUD, gleefully destroys more housing units than anyone is building (thank you volunteers, but let’s be real about the problem’s scope).

Not to be outdone by HUD or FEMA, Barbour is vastly enlarging Mississippi’s state port with $600 million federal recovery dollars intended for low-income family housing. With no shame, one of his explanations is that he cannot find any poor people in Mississippi (the poorest state in the US) who need or want the housing assistance (Katrina destroyed 60,000 housing units on the Mississippi coast). If one of the 20,000 families that did get one of Barbour’s slow-arriving “Governor’s Grants” had used a single cent to enlarge their home, he would be charging them with fraud and maybe even huffing about looters, as he did when Katrina hit.

To anyone paying attention, it is clear that certain state and federal leaders would rather see Americans - women, children, elderly, etc. - living in tents under I-10 than in houses or apartments funded with congressional recovery dollars. Surely not in FEMA trailers - the “smoking gun” evidence for at least one crime, and a stark indication of their true regard for citizens, taxpayers and human beings.

A number of friends and familiar faces were among the 1400 or so on hand for PolicyLink’s Regional Equity ’08 summit. A lively panel called “The New Orleans’ Story” was headlined by community organizer Barbara Major, Loyola University law professor Bill Quigley, Fr. Vien Nguyen of Mary Queen of Vietnam CDC and Louisiana ACORN’s Stephen Bradberry.Right after, Quigley and attorneys Tracie Washington of the Louisiana Justice Institute and Anita Sinha of the Advancement Project rushed downstairs to join public housing residents in front of the hotel for a rally and press conference concerning HUD’s really stupid demolition of habitable public housing throughout the city.

Back inside, a panel called Innovations and Inequities in Gulf Coast Recovery was billed as a discussion of “promising initiatives to address inequity in the region’s rebuilding.” Hmmm. Creative approaches were certainly shared, but none of them eclipsed the sobering truths confessed by panelists Tom O’Malley of the AFL-CIO’s Investment Trust Corporation, Rosalind Peychaud of NOLA’s Neighborhood Development Foundation, Ed Sivak of Enterprise Corporation of the Delta, or Derrick Christopher Evans of Turkey Creek Community Initiatives.

Although the KRV Express did appear on the Fox-8 evening news, the highlight of our day occurred when actor Danny Glover and others relaxing in the Sheraton’s huge atrium-lobby caught notice of our mobile billboard circling out front with the message “Poison trailers are only the tip of the iceberg.” Most seemed open to this suggestion, but none were more excited than Dr. Bob Bullard, intellectual father of the Environmental Justice movement. He rushed outside to snap photos and to chat with us about Katrina and Ritas’ remarkable invisibility as socio-environmental disasters. KRV’s suggestion: Someone with resources to promote sound public policy needs to make this Link.

  We returned to the Crescent City for Regional Equity ’08, PolicyLink’s 3-day national summit on equitable development, social justice and smart growth. With none of the above distinguishing our region’s 919 days of recovery so far, it sure seemed like the place to be. But first, we had to check out our boys, the Hot 8, who had just gotten home from conquering the British Isles. They were playing at the Howling Wolf Jazz Club to benefit the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center and the Louisiana Housing Alliance, two groups combating Louisiana’s affordable housing shortage and upsurge in discrimination. Afterwards, we headed to the Sheraton on Canal Street to check in for the conference. A big KRV shout-out to the hotel’s parking valets, who gladly accepted the keys to all 50-feet of our not so swanky or easy to park ride.

Dumbstruck by last night’s meeting between CDC officials and Baker, LA trailer residents, the KRV Express drove to New Orleans for two more of the agency’s “dog and pony shows.” Oddly called Public Availability Sessions instead of public meetings, both events drew a good crowd of soon-to-be-homeless poisoning victims. For the noon session, we arrived at Saint Maria Goretti Catholic Church with “EVICTION IS NOT THE SOLUTION” spelled out above our trailer’s most popular message to date: “The FEMA Three-Step: 1. Let ‘em drown 2. Give ‘em poison 3. Put ‘em out.”

Once inside, 15 minutes of CDC droning about methods, validity and inconclusive test results were followed by 15 minutes of Q & A with the audience. Like last night, most questions were about peoples’ severely limited housing options and fear of becoming homeless – topics the CDC scientists couldn’t and wouldn’t address. Also like last night, FEMA personnel remained conspicuously silent during this predictably emotional segment of the availability session.

Folks were then abruptly instructed to “break out” (in the meeting sense) for speaking one-on-one (and off the record) with representatives from both agencies - graciously on hand for even further inconclusive information. Several of them snapped more photos of audience members than they took time to speak with, and most residents just walked back to their cars and left.

When the 6pm meeting started at Saint Anna’s Episcopal Church in the Treme District, the KRV Express was already in place on Esplanade, greeting folks with the message: “Poison FEMA Trailers are only the Tip of the Iceberg – the State of Gulf Coast Poor Folks is Getting Worse.” We were surprised and honored to observe CDC workers (below) taking snapshots of one another against the lovely backdrop of our trailer.

Once inside, an equally unexpected twist occurred after the CDC’s opening (yawn) presentation – a full evening of audience Q&A – including the question, “Why did the Centers for Disease Control wait two whole years to look into the widest and longest sustained exposure of US citizens to formaldehyde in American history? The CDC scientist fielding questions turned extremely red, and didn’t offer an answer. He too appeared to be dumbstruck.

Until recently, the Renaissance Village trailer park in Baker, just north of Baton Rouge, was the “crown jewel” of FEMA’s sprawling Gulf Coast housing empire. As the largest of numerous travel trailer parks established by the agency following Hurricane Katrina, it is now the site of one of the region’s largest mass evictions. Of the 576 displaced families who lived here a few short months ago, only 220 remain – with absolutely nowhere else to go. Embarrassed by public disclosure of its incriminating internal memos and practices – and already liable for two and a half years of poisoning families with formaldehyde-laced trailers – FEMA desperately wants everyone out.

Downplaying past and current health effects while also shifting to victims the responsibility for any continued exposure is in the plan as well. This is why, after two years of ignoring complaints, FEMA invited the federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to test the trailers’ formaldehyde levels this past winter (when cooler weather yields significantly lower emissions). Often guilty of putting politics ahead of public health, CDC and ATSDR (Agency for Toxic Substance and Disease Registry) have at last arrived - 900 days late - for a series of community availability sessions about FEMA’s toxic trailers.  Update - Click here to read testimony from the Congressional Hearing before the Committee on Science & Technology entitled ” Toxic Trailers:  Have the Centers for Disease Control Failed to Protect Public Health”.

At the request of Renaissance Village residents and attorney Monique Harden (below) of Advocates for Environmental Human Rights, the KRV Express pulled into Baker to hear the test results. Not surprising, CDC’s conclusions were predictably twofold:

1. trailer occupants have most likely not been poisoned enough to become seriously ill.
2. trailer occupants should move out immediately to avoid becoming seriously ill.

Most of these people have been actively seeking alternatives for quite some time - but finding nothing affordable in the region’s post-hurricane housing market. Facing the choice between continued contamination and homelessness, many in the audience openly wept.

After a morning drive through the 7th Ward’s Saint Bernard public housing project (fully insured and repairable, but being demolished anyway with HUD and City Council approval) - the KRV Express spent Saturday afternoon up and down the hotel-lined streets of downtown New Orleans. Blaring the tunes of Marvin Gaye, Nina Simone, New Orleans’ own Hot 8 Brass Band and others – numerous laps were made around the city’s riverfront Convention Center, where Tavis Smiley’s 2008 State of Black the Black Union Summit was going on inside.

All along this meandering route, residents and tourists of all stripes boogied to our music and applauded the trailer’s billboard-size message of the day - “It takes sorry politicians and disaster profiteers to RAZE a village.” Afterwards, New Orleans attorney Tracie Washington of the Louisiana Justice Institute joined the KRV Express outside the legendary Dookie Chase’s restaurant, where dignitaries on hand for Smiley’s SOBU summit enjoyed a private dinner party just yards from the barricaded Lafitte public housing project (slated for demolition as well).

Hopefully, our education and advocacy efforts will help Black luminaries and summit participants do more to imagine and help achieve the truly just and comprehensive recovery that just isn’t happening – under anyone’s leadership.

To confront the Gulf Coast’s surprising and alarming absence from the presidential debates so far, the KRV Express rolled into Austin just hours before CNN’s Thursday evening debate at the University of Texas. With clutch assistance from UT Law students active in the Student Hurricane Network (who scored ample parking the night before), we snaked our way through the UT campus and downtown Austin for several hours before parking our sound truck and trailer for a scheduled “Open House” on the northeast corner of the tightly secured campus.

A racially diverse busload of Katrina and Rita survivors from coastal Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana had driven nearly ten hours to join us - a powerful reinforcement made possible by the Louisiana Disaster Recovery Foundation’s Equity and Inclusion Campaign. The riders, including some very spirited high schoolers from Thibodaux LA, definitely made their presence felt outside the debate hall with creative and deafening chants about the Gulf Coast’s unmet needs. With the media (including dozens of satellite trucks) and the crowd outside (thousands) predictably focused on the Clinton-Obama showdown – our group did succeed in being hard to miss.

Upon relocating downtown to view the debate and eat, the KRV Express and entourage moved into position near the Hyatt Regency hotel, where we knew that Texas Democratic Party bosses were awaiting post-debate visits from both candidates. As each motorcade turned into the hotel driveway, lamps illuminating a decked-out FEMA trailer and chants of “Gulf Coast, Needs You!” sprang up within 30 feet of their left-side passenger windows.

After an apparent discussion across the street, the fleet of motorcycle officers controlling traffic around the hotel did not (surprisingly) ask us to move. Now that’s respect, we mused. Evidenced also by Senator Clinton’s long look and wave upon exiting the Hyatt – the KRV Express raised a few eyebrows in Austin. Hopefully, meaningful commentary and action from the candidates, media and others will eventually follow.

UPDATE: The KRV Express got some nice coverage from the Texas Observer.

The KatrinaRitaVille Express national FEMA trailer tour is in Austin TX for today’s CNN Democratic Presidential Debate at the University of Texas.

The FEMA trailer will appear today by the UT Austin campus at 4 pm, at the corner of E. Dean Keaton St. and Robert Dedman Drive (see map, below).

This will be an open house, providing visitors with the opportunity to see inside a real FEMA trailer—the same vehicles that thousands of families are still living in today, two and a half years after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

The Equity and Inclusion Campaign of the Louisiana Recovery Foundation is bringing a bus of Gulf Coast residents—from Mobile Bay, AL, coastal Mississippi and coastal Louisiana—to meet the FEMA trailer near the east campus of UT Austin.

Displaced persons and folks back home will bear witness to the unmet housing, environmental, infrastructure and social justice needs of our region’s slow moving “recovery.

No presidential candidate or debate has yet acknowledged or addressed the public policy and enforcement climate that has harmed Gulf Coast people, communities and recovery efforts for more than 2 years.

For more information, call 228-326-400.

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