Trailer Park

A drug raid at a trailer park in New Mexico turned up what appeared to be classified documents taken from the Los Alamos nuclear weapons lab, the FBI said Tuesday. Police found the documents while arresting a man suspected of domestic violence and dealing methamphetamine from his mobile home, said Sgt. Chuck Ney of the Los Alamos, N.M., Municipal Police Department. The documents were discovered during a search of the man's records for evidence of his drug business, Ney said.

Freddy and Balmori Amaya stepped uneasily out of the armory room of the Tifton Police Department. Wrapped around their waists were bulky duty belts that forced them to hold their arms out from their torsos and walk, for the first time, like cops. As the brothers shuffled along a corridor lined with sepia photos of the city's white police chiefs, Balmori's "I {heart} El Salvador" key chain swayed from his back pocket. Tifton's newest Latino recruits were finally on the payroll.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has scrapped plans to evict 3,000 Mississippi households suspected of being ineligible for post-Hurricane Katrina emergency trailers after some recipients said that the government's mistaken determination had left them facing homelessness. Last month, the Los Angeles Times interviewed a number of Mississippians who said they had received eviction notices in error. Others cited what they described as gray areas in FEMA's eligibility requirements.

A temporary ban on constructing clusters of trailers in New Orleans neighborhoods was lifted by Mayor C. Ray Nagin on Wednesday, after he decided the benefits outweighed his reservations and homeowners' resistance to having a group of trailers nearby. Nagin's change of heart will allow the Federal Emergency Management Agency to continue to install group housing at 113 sites throughout the city.

The houses on Doerr Drive looked like the kind that could stand up to anything. But their heavy stone facades offered little resistance when the floodwater spilled through the town of Arabi in St. Bernard Parish, bursting windows and filling the postwar frame houses to ceiling level. For six months after Hurricane Katrina, this middle-income block east of New Orleans' Lower 9th Ward was deserted. Then, early this month, its first returning homeowner moved in.

Mayor Connie Moran wanted something better for her city's hurricane victims than rows of generic government trailers. She envisioned a neighborhood of "Katrina cottages" -- tiny yellow houses built in a Southern style, with sloped metal roofs and big front porches. They would be built with concrete foundations, not the tenuous straps and anchors that tether trailers to the ground.

A standoff between state park rangers and a rowdy crowd at El Morro Village trailer park ended peacefully early Sunday, authorities said Monday. Police from Laguna Beach and Newport Beach were called in after 11:30 p.m. Saturday to help disperse an estimated 300 to 1,000 people. The group was "blowing off steam" over the mobile-home site being converted to a state park, said a parks official.

Rolly Pulaski plans to take in one long, last view of the Pacific on Tuesday as he and his neighbors prepare to leave El Morro Village beachfront mobile home park. "Come by on the 28th; we'll be saying goodbye to the last sunset," said Pulaski, who fondly recalled many a late afternoon sitting on his hilltop terrace with his wife, Madine, who died last year. "From our favorite alcove we saw whales, hawks flying by, even a bobcat once."

If Jim Settle had had the money, he might have stayed in Redondo Beach. But he didn't, so he decided to buy a single-wide in Village Mobile Home Park in Gardena, where rent was cheap. For about $357 a month for 19 years, Settle had a quiet community, a decent-sized lawn and eventually cable TV. And at the end of this year, he and his neighbors will have an even bigger luxury -- the deed to their three-acre park.