Eric Alterman points out the appalling lack of press followup on the Katrina aftermath:

In late May, the Washington Post reported that in the immediate aftermath of Katrina, FEMA ordered $2.7 billion worth of emergency housing in the form of trailers, but in some cases these trailers had only a single page of specifications—notably absent from these scant guidelines were any meaningful safety requirements.

In the following months and years, residents of these trailers suddenly began falling ill—as many as 300,000 people, many of them children. It turns out that many of the trailers contained formaldehyde, an industrial chemical sometimes used to embalm corpses, and which can cause nasal cancer and worsens asthma and respiratory problems. (It also may be linked to leukemia).

The Centers for Disease Control says that one can only be exposed to these levels of formaldehyde safely for 15 minutes—and hundreds of thousands of people were living in them year-round. But the Post reports that “manufacturers did not discuss, nor did FEMA ask, if it would be safe to house evacuees in trailers for 18 months or more with such materials.”

FEMA’s culpability may be even more severe. House Democrats issues a report in January alleging that FEMA “ignored, hid, and manipulated government research” on the seemingly obvious risks of living in a small dwelling tainted with that toxic material. The report cites a letter written by a Center for Disease Control expert to a FEMA lawyer, which stated there was no “safe level” of formaldehyde, and that “failure to communicate this issue is possibly misleading and a threat to public health.” The researcher’s letter was ignored, and his office was bypassed when FEMA was investigating the safety of the trailers—they found no safety risk that couldn’t be cured by “opening windows,” according to the report.

These stories have been largely absent from the mainstream media’s major narratives of current events. CNN, which blasted FEMA’s negligence again and again in the aftermath of Katrina, has only mentioned the trailers twice since April. Fox News, of course, took no significant notice of the story. When one activist brought it up to Bill O’Reilly, he ignored the formaldehyde and wondered why the trailers were even being provided at all, saying, “Do you give these people houses and other entitlements in order to have a decent living? Or do you leave them under the bridge? Because that’s your choice. They can’t work. They spend their money on drugs and alcohol…. You’re giving it to people who are irresponsible in many, many cases.”

The story of poisoned trailers for FEMA victims is only part of the tale of government negligence on Katrina. Nearly 40 percent of those displaced by the storm live below the poverty line, according to the Census Bureau, and nearly one-third couldn’t find jobs, with thousands more no longer even trying.

The estimated cost of hurricane-related destruction in K-12 and higher education in Mississippi and Louisiana is $6.2 billion, but “the federal government has provided only $1.2 billion,” according to the Southern Education Foundation. Foreign governments contributed $131.5 million to recovery funding for Louisiana colleges, only slightly less than the $135 million contributed by the U.S. government.

And in his 2007 State of the Union speech, President Bush didn’t mention New Orleans once. This year, he only mentioned it briefly, mainly to note that the North American Summit would be held there.

Congress is currently considering cutting $73 million in housing aid for disabled Katrina victims. “Homeless advocate groups are becoming increasingly desperate to save the funds, which would provide about 3,000 housing assistance vouchers to mentally and physically disabled Katrina victims; nonprofits say they are the neediest segment of New Orleans’ swelling homeless population,” reports the Associated Press.

Sounds like a story to us….