FEMA's Dirty Little Secret

FEMA's Baker trailer park is a mysterious sanctuary, as 225 found out when we asked freelance writer Chuck Hustmyre to write about life in B.R.'s instant subdivision. The quest to simply enter the park became a story in itself as FEMA has surrounded the place in a baffling veil of secrecy and red tape. But once inside, Hustmyre met frustrated, angry people eager to tell the world about their troubled daily lives.

Much within Renaissance Village--the grandiosely named smudge of dirt and limestone on the outskirts of Baker that's home to 565 travel trailers---remains largely concealed from the outside world, as does the plight of the 1,600 displaced New Orleanians who now call the place home. Their trailer park is protected by a veil of inexplicable procedures that not even government workers agree on.

I thought, rather naively, I could simply stroll the grounds of Renaissance Village, talk to the residents, maybe take some pictures and generally get a feel for how the residents were faring as they prepared for their first Christmas away from home, family and friends.

But the Federal Emergency Management Agency carefully manages and monitors information coming out of the Groom Road trailer park. Not even local law enforcement officials can get all the information they believe they need to ensure the public safety.

The first hint things weren't going to be easy came from an old salt at The Advocate who told me FEMA assigns handlers to reporters, at least they did whenever the newspaper covered a staged visit by a dignitary looking for a photo op.

Still, how much trouble could it be? I wondered. After all, I was just trying to write a story about people who are trying to put their lives back together.

My first call was to Don Johnson, one of the park's assistant managers. Johnson told me he couldn't let me on the property unless I obtained approval from a higher-up at FEMA.

"It's like a gated community," Johnson tried to explain. I pointed out access to a gated community usually requires only the permission of a member of the community, not the federal government.

To try to get FEMA's permission to go into the park, I stopped in at the agency's area headquarters at the old Goudchaux's building on Main Street in Baton Rouge. When I asked Manny Broussard, a FEMA public relations contractor, about getting into the park to conduct some interviews, his response was immediate. "It's not going to happen," he said. He reminded me of that guy from those credit card commercials, the one who always says no.

Next, I called Chad Ladov, a FEMA public information officer, who was actually at the park when we spoke. I asked him if I could come out and do some interviews. Ladov said he would check on it and call me back. An hour or so later Ladov called back and said no.

I felt an Orwellian shudder. Was the government really thwarting my efforts to interview people?

Ladov referred me to his boss, Gail Tate, also a FEMA public information officer. Ms. Tate said I had been misinformed. Of course I could go to the park and interview some of the residents. I simply needed to clear it with her first.

"We are trying to make sure that the residents are as comfortable as possible," Tate explained, "and that there are as few intrusions into their lives as possible."

After a few bureaucratic bumps, everything was back on track. I was going to get to write my story after all. Tate said she'd call back. Shades of Orwell's 1984 seemed to be fading.

Meanwhile, Fred Raiford, spokesman for the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff's Office, was telling me FEMA has refused to provide his office with a list of park residents, citing privacy issues. Raiford said from his perspective, getting the list is a public safety issue. Between Oct. 1. (the day the park opened) and Dec. 15, the Sheriff's Office answered 80 calls for assistance at the trailer park and made 25 arrests.

"We know there are some criminals there," Raiford said. "And we know there are some sex offenders there."

Susan Lindsey, regional director for the state's division of probation and parole, estimates about 25% of the 8,000 probationers and parolees from the greater New Orleans area are still unaccounted for. About 30 of them are registered sex offenders with outstanding arrest warrants.

Baker Fire Chief Danny Edwards has had his own run-ins with FEMA over the trailer park. "Everything is so secretive out there that it's unreal," he said.

"We simply don't do a-day-in-the-life-type stories," she said. "But if you'd like to do a story, it's just like any other gated community. If you're invited by a resident, you're more than welcome to come in."

"The FEMA policy is that all media be escorted," Tate said. "We don't intervene or anything, but we have to be there. We have a presence."

Why aren't the residents free to talk to whomever they want without a government overseer? I asked. Tate dove into a bureaucratic foxhole. "That's the policy," she repeated.

"I'm an evacuee," Tate explained. "We're not 100%, and we don't always make the best judgments when we're not 100%."

Her message was clear: Evacuees needed someone to make their decisions for them and who better to take care of that than the government.

The security guards stopped me at the gate. I asked assistant manager Don Johnson if he could arrange an interview for me. He disappeared into the park's administrative office.

While I waited, a man came into the park and asked a security guard for directions to one of the trailers. The guard gave him directions and off the man went. It got me thinking.

The security guard paused for a few seconds, then said, "Well, private citizens are in here visiting...They're no threat to these people."

At the Baker Post Office, which is located up the road from the park, I ran into park residents Sonja Fletcher and Lisa Washington.

Washington has her view of why FEMA and the Keta Group, the company FEMA contracted to run the day-to-day operations of the trailer park, have placed so many restrictions on reporters. "They don't want nobody to come in there to find out what's really going on," Washington said.

A Keta Group spokesman, who refused to give his full name, told me the company employs about 60 residents at the park, mainly for food service and maintenance.

Some of those employees, Fletcher and Washington insist, take the lion's share of donations intended for park residents, everything from toys to toiletries to turkeys.

"The thing is, the Keta workers who manage [the park], it's like whatever is there for us, they take it," he said.

Willie Converse lives at the park and drives a bus for a living. He's not there most of the time when Keta distributes the donated items. And because he's away working, he doesn't get much. "You get penalized for working," he said. "That's the way it seems."

The next day, I returned to the park. Tired of the bureaucratic runaround, I decided to take a different approach. I decided to go covert. I used to keep a strip of paper pegged to a bulletin board above my desk on which was printed a line from Gen. Douglas MacArthur. The line went like this: "Rules are mostly made to be broken and are too often for the lazy to hide behind."

Not wanting to risk an American icon of the stature of Gen. MacArthur would have thought me lazy, I opted to bend--if not flat out break--the rules. FEMA and the Keta Group made it fairly easy. Although the draconian dictums had initially thwarted me, I suspected standard government-issued inefficiency could still work to my advantage. And I was right.

With my press credentials, notebook and camera stashed out of sight, I slipped into the trailer park as a visitor.

What I found--on the surface, at least--was a fairly neat, well-run housing complex. The 65-acre park is divided into sections designated by letters. The 565 travel trailers sit in neat rows, the trailers lettered and numbered. There's a cafeteria, several laundry rooms, a recreation area, a free eye clinic, even a satellite television vendor.

Trina Roberts has lived at the Groom Road trailer park since it opened. She's a single mother of three, but recently sent her children away to stay with relatives because of the poor living conditions at the park. She told me she doesn't feel safe there.

"There's really no law here," she said. "There are at least three drug trailers where people go in and out all night long." The unarmed security force isn't enough to protect the residents, Roberts said, and she is upset about FEMA's reluctance to cooperate with local law enforcement. "They should have gone ahead and given the sheriff what he needed to come in here and get these drugs out of here," she said. And Roberts agreed with others who suggested that a sheriff's substation, operating out of one of the empty trailers, would be a big help.

Whins said it's the underside of the park FEMA doesn't want anyone to see: drug dealing, theft and violence.

"A guy got stabbed in H section," Whins said, talking about a recent incident. "There's violence here. Some gets reported, some don't."

All the red tape virtually obscures the real-life dramas unfolding a day at a time in this home-away-from-home for New Orleans' storm evacuees.

Whins, it turns out, is living in a 30-foot trailer with his ex-wife and six children. At first, he had his own trailer and could visit his children. Then his parents arrived at the park, so he gave them his trailer and moved in with his ex, so he could be near his children.

Whins said he recently saw a drug addict trying to sell a $50 gift card for $20 cash.

Some people in the trailer park used their connections with Keta Group resident employees to horde toys before Christmas even though they had no children living with them, Whins said. "A lot of people who didn't have kids ended up with four and five bikes," he added. "I was there. I saw this."

I asked Whins why someone would do that. He pointed to a nearby bicycle. "To a crackhead, that's money."

Whins says he knows plenty about drugs and drug dealers: He was one. In the 1990s, he got busted for selling dope and went to prison. "I've done my time, and I'm not ashamed," he said.

Whins suggested one solution to the problems plaguing the trailer park would be for the sheriff's office to open a substation there. He also thinks the park's security force needs more training. "Security is a joke," he said.

The idea FEMA wants to monitor conversations between residents and reporters also bothers Whins. "I'm not a prisoner," he said. "If we can have drug dealers coming in here, why can't we talk to a reporter? I don't need no chaperone to have a conversation with you. I'm 42 years old."

On my way out of the trailer park, I noticed something that lent credence to what Whins told me.

As a veteran of more than 20 years of law enforcement, including a decade working violent crime in New Orleans housing projects, I know a thing or two about indicators of criminal activity. I spotted a few thugmobiles rolling through the park: expensive cars, tricked out, pumping out so much bass the ground shakes. The drivers laid back in their seats, eyes shaded, caps cocked sideways, looking cool and without a care in the world.

Is FEMA consciously trying to hide the raw reality of crime in its trailer park?

Is its veil of secrecy over the park connected to the fact the agency is desperately trying to convince more communities around Louisiana to accept trailer parks, so it can move more evacuees out of expensive hotels?

After visiting the park and after hearing some of the residents' allegations of dope peddling, theft, and violence, I made repeated calls to FEMA to get answers. None of my calls were returned.

The government's stonewalling leaves many more questions than there are answers about the Groom Road trailer park and its rules. Too bad FEMA won't let reporters in to look around, and the agency won't cooperate with local law enforcement.

I'm kind of confused by the whole angle of this story. There is just something that doesn't ring true to it all. Why would FEMA find the need to hide the fact that drug dealers that were evacuated out of NOLA were still dealing drugs? Why do we believe everything that a few residents of the trailer park said to this reporter? Maybe they are just trying to protect the privacy of the people, so they don't have hordes of reporters who are just trying to find some dirt bothering the people all the time. It just sounds like the same old FEMA bashing crap to me.

I just did a google search on Baker FEMA trailer park. It doesn't sound like reporters have had such a hard time getting in there. There were a ton of different articles from different reporters. There is even an article from the BBC about the Baker park -

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4481080.stm

It says Baker's security is provided by the local sheriff's department. The two residents they talked to said they liked the place.

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