I know it is a lame excuse because having an RV magazine editor live in a formaldehyde-invested FEMA trailer for a week would shatter FEMA’s claim that our industry is somehow at fault for the new mess the agency finds itself facing.

Also, I haven’t heard from our “friends” at Sierra Club. Apparently they can’t find a poisonous trailer for me to live in either.

Anyone else have access to a FEMA trailer? Ideally, the model I would like to live in for a week would be extra stinky after having been closed up extra tight for months.

Read our press release on formaldehyde @ http://www.transworldnews.com/newsstory.aspx?ID=24399

Sampling Medium: Chemically Activated High-Purity Silica Gel
Method Of Analysis: High Performance Liquid Chromatography
Reference Method: NIOSH Method 2016
Collection Rate: 63 ml/minute
Exposure Limits: OSHA 0.75 ppm for 8 hours (PEL)
2.0 ppm for 15 minutes (STEL)
Minimum Level of Quantitation: 0.01 ppm for 8 hours; 0.003 ppm for 24 hours;
0.3 ppm for 15 minutes
Accuracy: Overall System Accuracy: 16% at 0.75 ppm for 8 hours
20% at 2.0 ppm for 15 minutes.
Independent Validation of Accuracy

Instead of hiding behind the toxic trailer web site that is linked to you in this blog (www.toxictrailers.com), why didn’t you provide the real information behind your comments? A simple Google searc on Ms. Gillette provides us a glimpse of her background and I suspect she has never purchased or associated herself with RVs, except to bash them in print with inaccurate inforation:

Becky Gillette is conservation chair of the Mississippi Chapter of Sierra Club, and secretary of the GCRCC. She is a free-lance writer based in Ocean Springs, Miss., who has published in about 50 magazines and newspapers nationwide. In 2002 she received the National Conservation Achievement Award for communications from the National Wildlife Federation. She can be reached at: bgillette@XXXXXXXXXX

Most writers and contributers that take a strong dissident point of view will provide this type of information if they really believe in their cause and won’t hide behind a web site that lists two law firms for easy contact by these so-called victims.

The only victims here are the hard-working people in the RV industry that thought they were doing something good for people that couldn’t even comprehend the severity of a storm that everyone knew was going to do devastating damage to the area, and yet did nothing about it and have been living off the government ever since - with our tax dollars.

gt knapp, an avid rv’er

Thanks for sharing this nice summary with everyone. The only point that I would add is that not all glues that are used in wood manufacturing contain formaldehyde. Polyurethane adhesives, for example, which are the primary type of adhesive used in manufacturing laminated walls do not contain formaldehyde. Some waterbased emulsion adhesives or “white glues” contain a small amount of formaldehyde that is residue from the manufacturing process of the resin. As you state in your message this material reacts quickly and is not present at very high levels at all. The main type of adhesive that uses formaldehyde as a reactive agent is typically used in the plywood industry (called either urea formaldehyde or melamine formaldehyde depending on the type of adhesive). The plywood used for the walls, as well as the floors would have typically been made with one of these products.

All of the adhesive suppliers are required to disclose the amount of formaldehyde that is present in their products on their MSDS, so that the user (RV manufacturer) can be certain that their workers are working in a safe environment. As you point out, if proper ventilation is used, any residual amount of material will be removed. If this was not true, you would have seen an epidemic in Northern Indiana, the RV manufacturing capital of the world, and I last I checked, everyone was doing fine.

Mark Cole

Can you give us more information about the people living in Government provided FEMA trailers that “spent literally thousands of dollars at emergency rooms because they didn’t know what was making them sick”?

I’m with Greg, set up the trailer and I’ll live in it for a week. I’ve been RVing for thirty years in everything from a pop-up to a large motorhome and haven’t been sick a day in my life. I read the instruction manuals and actually do what the manufacturer recommends.

The people you associate with are the same ones that burn their toast in the morning, and then it lights a fire to burn down their house, and you go running for the yellow pages to find the best ambulance chaser in town.

If the government officials in New Orleans did what they should have done, this issue would never have come up.

At what point in our society do we stop paying for stupidity, ignorance and indifference to those that will not fend for themselves.

As a taxpayer, and a conservative (in case you couldn’t figure that out), I’m sick and tired of my hard earned dollars chasing environmentalist’s dreams, welfare cheats, and government officials that never worked in the dreaded “private sector” as we like to call it.

Worse than that, you all line up behind Al Gore as your role model and hero and the politicians he left behind in Washington that are only interested in feeding at the trough of public stupidity.

Why is it that Al Gore won’t debate anybody that disagrees with his assumptions and declarations?

Why is it that the Sierra Club is so interested in these lawsuits? As for Theo, what is it about our facts that you don’t like? Probably the same things that Al Gore doesn’t like - the real truth, the real consequences, and the real need for people to once again assume some measure of responsbility for their own actions and stop waiting for the next lawyer, or Sierra Club van, to drive down the street.