[Recovery Pen chronicles the baffling, beautiful life in the American outpost of New Orleans.]

I've done some strange things post-Katrina, but perhaps Friday night was the strangest: not only did I stay home to watch TV, but I flipped past Pulp Fiction and stand-up comics for C-SPAN. I'd never spent more than a nanosecond watching that channel before, as much as I've always felt that as a good American, I really should see what those clowns in Washington were up to. Maybe if they dressed more like clowns, instead of those drab suits, I'd have tuned in before.

But I digress. Friday night, they were airing the congressional hearing on formaldehyde in FEMA trailers, so I felt obliged to watch. I'd heard nothing about formaldehyde in the trailers, but I wasn't surprised to hear that they were full of poison. Sadly, I was less surprised to hear that even though the FEMA field workers responded with alarm, the FEMA lawyers in Washington played it cool. Cold, even. They advised the field workers not to do anything, because, and I quote, "once you get results that show something, our clock is running to do something about it."

Now that's the sort of laissez-faire attitude you might expect from a New Orleanian regarding a paternity test, but you like to think that the federal government might could step up when it learns that its overpriced trailers are poisoning people. Of course, Katrina has showed us all how much the government really cares about people in a desperate situation.

But interestingly, I've found that the less the government cares, the more I care personally. Not that it's going to do a whole lot of good, besides helping my mom stay abreast on New Orleans issues, but what more can I do? So I sat through two hours of testimony, most of it from Mississippi Gulf Coast residents. A pediatrician who's noted a jump in asthma and sinus-related problems among children in FEMA trailers spoke, then an industrial safety specialist, and then three trailer residents: a white military guy, a white mother with sick children, and a black minister.

The industrial safety specialist explained that formaldehyde is in the glue used to keep the particleboard and plywood on the trailer walls. Not only can it bring on respiratory miseries of all sorts, from scratchy throats to bloody noses to breathing difficulties, but it's a known carcinogen. While OSHA standards allow for healthy, adult workers to be exposed to trace amounts of formaldehyde, they need to use a respirator when levels reach .016 parts per million. And, of course, these workers get to go home to sleep in clean air at night. On the Gulf Coast, infants and children and the elderly live 24/7 in trailers which have been tested by environmental groups as having up to .75 parts per million. Note that when FEMA did finally check out their trailers, they first opened all the windows and had the air running constantly for a few days before doing the air-quality test. So when an internal FEMA email stated that "there are no health concerns due to formaldehyde in our trailers," they were referring to the air from their rigged test, not the actual air-quality conditions in their trailers.

For all of the new technology out there, it was a bird that helped Paul Stewart realize the grave health risk in his trailer. When his pet cockatiel seemed lethargic, he called the vet, who advised him to get the bird out of the trailer immediately. The vet said that if the bird continued to live in the trailer, it would die. Even though Stewart and his wife had already been miserable with respiratory problems, seeing his bird's fragility brought it home that he and his wife were living in a health hazard. In his testimony, which you can read here, he details his struggles trying to get a new trailer from FEMA, who kept advising him to air his trailer out, despite the fact he'd been airing it out for months. At one point, they suggested that maybe he was just "chemically-sensitive," and he pointed out that he'd been tazed and pepper-sprayed in the military, and so his sensitivity wasn't the problem. When he did get another trailer, it also reeked with formaldehyde, and after more struggling, he got a third trailer, which was filthy and infested with bugs. Finally he plunked down $50 grand on his own trailer, which was larger and nicer than the one which FEMA paid $65 K for.

I figured Lindsay Huckabee, mother of five in a FEMA trailer, would give emotional testimony, as mothers of sick children often do. However, she was quite composed, given the circumstances. Yet my heart went out to her, and especially for her youngest child, who missed 42 days of kindergarten due to formaldehyde-related ailments. You don't need to be a schoolteacher to know that missing over a month during your first school year will not get you ahead in life. Many days, Mrs. Huckabee sent her little girl to school, and the nurse had to send her home, due to unstoppable nosebleeds. One day, she found her daughter on the floor of the trailer, covered in blood, and thought nothing of it; later that night, she cried for hours to think of how she'd gotten accustomed to her daughter's ill health. As well, her 30-year old husband got diagnosed with mouth cancer while living in the trailer. Coincidence?

Lastly, Mr. James Harris, Jr. testified as a minister and a trailer resident. He stated numerous times - five times in the first minute of his speech - that he'd been "blessed" by God, and also expressed how grateful he was just to have a trailer. Still, his family's health problems and the noxious smell of their trailer couldn't be ignored. Like the other trailer residents, all he got from FEMA was the advice to "air out" his trailer. He ended up in the ER, and eventually had to borrow money to buy a high-quality air purifier. He reminded us of all the folks that don't know what to do, and so make the best of it and suffer in silence. Tens of thousands of these people are breathing in this foul, cancerous air right now.

As Chairman of the Oversight and Reform Committee, Congressman Henry Waxman (D, CA) stated that "it's impossible to read the FEMA documents and not become infuriated," and I completely agree. As politicians yammer on about "family values," tens of thousands of families are being poisoned in government property. Although it can be fun to focus on the hypocrisy of Christian Sen. David Vitter's dalliance with prostitutes, no one's getting cancer or going to the ER based on his bad behavior. That a government agency charged with protecting us is slowly killing us instead - this should be the front-page news, and we should be filling the streets, shaking with anger.

(If you are living in a polluted trailer, click this link to report your story and get more information.)