While the CDC and FEMA want to move thousands of families living along the Gulf Coast out of travel trailers, there are Arkansans living in those same homes.
There are big questions for the Arkansas Department of Emergency Management tonight. What are we going to do with people living in travel trailers and where are we going to move them? While it searches for answers, a couple that's called a travel trailer home since last March say they are ready to move out.
Roy Dalton and his wife Mable have lived in a FEMA travel trailer since a tornado tore through Dumas on February 24, 2007.
"It beats a tent. It's nice, it's comfortable,” Dalton says. It's not like home but after several months it becomes home." Goins says: "No health problems at all?" Dalton says: "No, none at all."
Despite reports of health dangers from formaldehyde Dalton says he hasn't thought much of it. He is almost ready to move into the couple’s new home, next door to their FEMA trailer.
Week by week more trailers get turned back in as homeowners rebuild. Dumas had 16, there are now just two left inside city limits. Two other trailers are in use, one each in Desha and Bradley County.
Goins says: "If you were still living in it would you want them to take it?" Dalton says: "Not because of the formaldehyde, no."
Dalton says walking inside it is a lot like vacation travel trailers he's stayed in before, just never this long.
“We were here in the hot part of the summertime,” Dalton says. “July, August & September, and we didn't have any problems."
The Dalton's knew there were risks. FEMA sent them a letter last summer explaining possible formaldehyde issues in travel trailers. Now that they are ready to move out, they say it's too bad FEMA won't use units like this to help others who need it.
"We're proud to get out of it, clean it up and let them come and get it,” Dalton says. Maybe take it up north and maybe let someone in northern part of the state use it."
That won't happen now. Dalton hopes recent tornado victims get something.
"It was a big comfort when we got it,” Dalton says. And I know all those people in the northern part of the state are like we were last year."
There are also 24 mobile homes in use after the Dumas tornado. ADEM says they don't know what FEMA will do, if anything, with those homes.
ADEM says it plans to meet with people living in those trailers in the next few weeks to figure out what to do.
No one living in the trailers in Arkansas has cited any health problems from formaldehyde.
