A congressional committee has investigated the reasons for the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s slow response to hurricane Katrina when everyone in the country should by now know the answer to that one.

What this committee should have been investigating is what’s happening now, six months after Katrina broke the levees that flooded New Orleans and two other hurricanes of equal strength struck the Gulf Coast just weeks later, one of them flooding New Orleans for a second time.

For example, after spending hundreds of millions to round up thousands of fully furnished trailers as temporary homes for people in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Texas, the vast majority of these trailers are still sitting in staging areas waiting to be delivered.

On Wednesday, February 22nd, the Los Angeles Times published an article titled “The Land of 10,770 Empty FEMA Trailers” that detailed what was happening at the airport in Bill Clinton’s home town of Hope, Arkansas, and the fact that the federal government was about to spend a few million more to cover pastures with stone and gravel so many of these trailers wouldn’t sink into the mud this spring.

On the same day, NBC covered the story of how “nearly 18,000 trailers are waiting in Mississippi, Texas, Arkansas and Louisiana” and how a mere 1,700 trailers are actually in use in New Orleans where more than fifty thousand homes were lost.

What’s the hold up?

The most glaring sign of incompetence is that it now turns out that federal regulations prohibit placing government property in a flood zone. At least, that’s the latest excuse for not delivering the trailers.

Isn’t that incredible? Evidently, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is just now realizing that the entire city of New Orleans is below sea level. That Lake Pontchartrain whose waters broke the levees and flooded the city is two feet above sea level. And that these dykes are not being “fixed” or brought back to anything more than what they were before Katrina struck.

What’s more, the local government and many of the people of New Orleans are complaining that the infrastructure (electricity, water, and sewage) isn’t there to support trailer camps and FEMA is picking the wrong neighborhoods for the trailers that are in use.

It’s also interesting to note that on February 19th the New York Times published an editorial called “Congress, Can You Spare a Dime?” in which the author told us how Congress had just gone on vacation “without passing a law to extend unemployment benefits to 164,000 people who are still jobless after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, even though the benefits start to expire at the beginning of March.”

In other words, we’ve got another expensive bureaucratic mess on our hands. One that is not going to go away, cannot be ignored forever, or patched with inadequate bandages.

No one is yet questioning the very basic idea of providing trailers in the first place, even as temporary shelters while people pitch in to rebuild their city. There are reasons why in any sizable storm these so-called “mobile” homes are dangerous and always the first structures to be severely damaged, often with a cost in lives.

Even the efforts of Jimmy Carter and his well intentioned Habitat for Humanity people plus other good hearts who voluntarily build “stick houses” in hurricane zones can easily be off the mark if they do not follow stringent building codes for hurricane zones. Islanders of the hurricane prone Caribbean, where building materials are hard to come by, rarely settle for less than concrete block in the homes they build for themselves. We should have learned that lesson when Hurricane Andrew took down every inferior wood structure in Homestead, Florida, and left a clear dividing line between that city and the abutting city of South Miami where right across the street homes built under stricter building codes with better enforcement stood up because they were not stapled together.

And that's just part of the living problem in "The Big Empty."

On February 23rd, the Washington Post published an article titled "Safety of Post-Hurricane Sludge is Disputed" which claims that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says that the flooding in New Orleans deposited materials "dangerous to human health" that tests prove are still there. If you remember, besides petrochemical waste there were at least three biological development laboratories in the Big Easy that were "compromised" in the floods.

On the same day, the New York Times ran an article about the graft and corruption involved with companies contracted by the federal government to cleanup debris, how small local contractors are being slighted, and the political favoritism involved.

New Orleans is looking more and more like Iraq where electricity has yet to be restored to most of the country and the ground has been poisoned by our use of depleted uranium, a substance that doesn't disappear and is poisoning our own troops. Isn't that what Saddam is accused of doing?

One thing’s for certain. If a hurricane went up the Chesapeake and if that storm could possibly be related to terrorist weather manipulation or a jihad backed by Allah, no expense would be spared protecting Washington and there would be no talk of turning the port of Baltimore over to Arabs.

And that begs the question of precisely where FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security have spent billions of taxpayer dollars. It certainly hasn’t gone to “first responders” who’ve received nothing but regulations, a few gas masks, and are now engaged in telemarketing campaigns for funding.