Copyright 2006 The Times-Picayune Publishing Company
N.O. evacuee winds up with FEMA data
By SUSAN LANGENHENNIG
Times-Picayune (New Orleans)
When Deanna Braun returned to New Orleans to assess her hurricane-damaged home, she packed some of her belongings and shipped them back to her temporary residence in Philadelphia.
Her roommates piled the packages in her room, unopened. So it was easy for the thick UPS envelope to go unnoticed in the pile.
Returning to Philly on Friday, more than a month after her trip to New Orleans, Braun noticed the envelope, tore it open and found a stack of Federal Emergency Management Agency documents filled with applicants’ names, FEMA registration numbers, birth dates, signatures and an inspector’s name and identification number. She didn’t know why the papers, none of which pertained to her, were shipped there.
“It’s sort of scary,” said Braun, 27. “The whole thing is really strange. It just seems like someone screwed up along the way, but this is people’s livelihoods; people are really depending on these applications.”
The paperwork was wrapped in a rubber band, with a torn piece of loose-leaf paper with “FEMA” scribbled on it, Braun’s roommate Amy Ignatow said. A list on top of the files said it contained 240 forms, including such personal information as storm-damaged addresses and applicants’ birth dates and signatures, Ignatow said. All the forms seemed to be from New Orleans addresses, the roommates said.
Nicol Andrews, a FEMA spokeswoman in Washington, D.C., said Wednesday that the agency plans to investigate how the paperwork got misplaced. The documents appear to be Declaration and Release forms filled out by property owners and renters when they meet with a FEMA inspector to determine eligibility for assistance.
“This is the form you would fill out if an inspector comes to your house,” she said. “This information is not public, and we are certainly investigating how it got there. We absolutely take this very seriously.”
Andrews said the misplaced documents should not delay applicants from receiving FEMA assistance because the information is entered into a computer by the inspector, in addition to the paper copy.
“At the same time they log it in written form, they have these hand-held computers and the information is sent back to the databases that calculate eligibility,” she said.
Though Andrews was unsure whether FEMA planned to contact each of the applicants, she said “any violation of the Privacy Act will be addressed immediately and appropriately.”
FEMA spokesman James McIntyre asked the roommates to ship the package back to FEMA’s Baton Rouge office. The women said they would happily comply.
Although Braun had never before seen the documents, the envelope said it was shipped by her to Ignatow. “I didn’t send that,” Braun said, adding that she filed for assistance from FEMA by phone after the hurricane but has never met with a FEMA inspector.
The package arrived in Philadelphia with others that Braun sent, so Ignatow and another roommate, Monique Powell, took no notice of it. But once Braun opened it, they became worried.
“We just want to make sure it gets back where it needs to be,” Ignatow said.