Coping With The FEMA Trailer

"If you were to fly over rural Hancock County here, you would see more than 9,000 of them, white rectangles clumped in sun-bleached parks and scattered in piney woods like pieces of a trashed picket fence. Pick any one, and contained within that FEMA trailer are lives in claustrophobic suspension."

"FEMA trailer. The phrase has nearly lost meaning, so embedded is it in the national memory of last year's crushing hurricanes, Katrina and Rita. The Federal Emergency Management Agency provided trailers to people whose homes were damaged or destroyed; got it.

But tens of thousands of people continue to live crammed in FEMA trailers, greeting this year's hurricane season the same way they said goodbye to the last one: in light-metal boxes that even a tropical storm could flip like playing cards and which seem so vulnerable alongside the brush fires crackling through some stretches of the Gulf Coast."