30 Days' Notice at the FEMA Trailer

D'IBERVILLE, Miss. — The mail carrier brought the registered letter to Jessica Lessard's tiny trailer, along with a sour and foreboding comment:

"I hope you got better news than I got," she said.

Lessard, 24, tore open the envelope and felt like crying. The letter was from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. It said she and her family had 30 days to leave the flimsy, government-issued box that has been their home since Hurricane Katrina.

Three weeks later, Lessard; her fiance, George Courtney; and their 3-year-old son are still worried, though they have appealed their case. The house they once shared with Courtney's stepfather was ruined by the storm, and they can't afford the Gulf Coast's post-Katrina rents. Nearby relatives are also in trailers or in homes with no room for them.

Lessard's family is one of about 3,000 in Mississippi that have been deemed ineligible for a trailer as FEMA weeds out those Katrina victims who do not meet the qualifications for its emergency housing program.

About 450 households have received eviction letters from FEMA; the rest are scheduled to receive notices in the next few weeks. Mississippi has 38,000 FEMA trailers. Some are clustered on open fields and parking lots; others are parked next to water-spoiled homes.

(Similar eviction efforts are underway in Louisiana, which has 68,000 trailers sprinkled around the state. There, however, officials are in the early stages of screening, and only 57 ineligible families have been identified, an agency spokeswoman said.)

The reasons for the evictions are varied, and many are legitimate. There are trailer dwellers who could not prove they are legal U.S. residents; people who had owned a second, undamaged home all along; and people whose homes were damaged, but not by Katrina.

The trailers, which are generally 240 square feet, are returned to a FEMA staging area in Purvis, Miss., where they are cleaned and repaired, then stored until they are needed again.

But a number of residents said they were being kicked out erroneously, or for technicalities that arise from gray areas in FEMA regulations. Lessard's problem is one of the most common: FEMA officials told her she was ineligible because someone from her previous residence had also requested a trailer.