NEW ORLEANS — Belinda Jenkins was picking up her diabetes medication Tuesday afternoon, and worrying about being away from the trailer she has lived in since Hurricane Katrina trashed her house.
Jenkins, a disabled 53-year-old, is afraid the Federal Emergency Management Agency is scheming to take the flimsy box away. So she keeps a handwritten note taped to the door, asking officials to at least call her cellphone so she can come back and get her stuff.
"Thank you," the note reads. "Have a bless day."
FEMA may not be so sneaky about it, but it definitely has designs on the trailer. About 44 months after the storm, the agency is now ready to shut down the most expensive -- and flawed -- emergency housing program in its history.
Federal officials, who have postponed the trailer deadline numerous times, say they have finally arrived at May 30 as the firm date for emptying the 4,600 remaining FEMA trailers in Louisiana and Mississippi.
Jenkins and others recently received a letter from the agency stating that the trailer program technically ended May 1. The letter threatened legal action against residents if they are not out by the end of the month.
Even now, however, the program is proving difficult to end. Housing advocates say that many of those who remain in the trailers are among the Gulf Coast's most vulnerable residents -- the poor, the ill and the elderly. And they are worried the residents have few other options on a crippled post-storm landscape.
Last week, the co-chairs of the Louisiana Advocacy Coalition for the Homeless wrote to acting FEMA Administrator Nancy Ward, imploring her to extend the deadline to keep the residents from being thrown out on the streets.
Jenkins said she and her longtime boyfriend, a construction worker, can't afford the rents that have soared in New Orleans since the storm. Inside the stripped and gutted house behind her FEMA trailer, she pointed out a bed frame that her boyfriend recently brought in. She said he's been talking about sleeping there.
"I don't have no plan right now," she said, sobbing. "I don't know where I'm going to go."
The fate of these remaining trailer-dwellers has raised, perhaps for the last time, some fundamental questions about FEMA's response to this unprecedented disaster.
