(cross-posted to Vermont Watch, here)

(above subject header sounds like what should be the title of a song. blues anybody?)

FEMA housing units headed to Vermont

‘Superstructures’ may be needed for winter

By Peter Hirschfeld

Vermont Press Bureau – Published: September 28, 2011

MONTPELIER – Displaced flood victims unable to find permanent shelters before winter could end up in mobile housing units provided by FEMA, state officials said Tuesday.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has already delivered 10 “park unit mobile homes” to a staging area in Springfield. Secretary of Commerce Lawrence Miller says additional units are at the ready if newly homeless residents cannot secure suitable shelter in advance of the cold season.

“We’ll use these as essentially the last resort,” Miller says. “We’d much prefer to find more traditional rental housing. But this could be a very good solution for some Vermonters.”

[…]

Read the article in full (via Rutland Herald; not behind paywall, at least for the moment anyway), here.

Now I finally know what was being indirectly referenced, however briefly, by Governor Peter Shumlin when he spoke during the half hour or so appearance he made at today’s joint Vermont Affordable Housing Coalition (VAHC) and Vermont Coalition to End Homelessness (VCEH) meeting.

Please excuse me while I simultaneously scratch my head during a “say what!?” moment and also pick up my jaw from off the floor where it fell after reading this article about something that appears to make about as much sense to me as the state seriously pondering going back to the two upper floors of the state hospital — which would be fine if it were to provide office space for the Department of Mental Health (DMH), but not for returning patients or staff there.

Hmmm, in the meantime, maybe those who think the FEMA trailers are a good option for those in need could volunteer to live in them and allow those in need of housing as a result of Tropical Storm Irene to use their housing instead. As if ….

Would really like to learn more about the meeting the article reported about as well as specifically who was at the meeting when this particular option was approved as well as, as importantly, who was not at or represented during the meeting.

Although one understands the need to do something versus doing nothing in such cases, one would of course hope there has to be better and different ways to resolve these matters.

One only hopes someone truly knows what they are doing in these regards.

By the way, has anyone done some rigorous and independent quality control, structural, health and environmental testing on at least one of these trailers to the standard of the worse of what they could be put through during a long, hard Vermont Winter, etc.? If not, maybe now is the time, before it is far too late to do so. And, if these are used as a “last resort”, please do not put them within a flood plain either.

Morgan W. Brown

Montpelier