By James Varney
Times-Picayune (New Orleans)
Copyright 2006 The Times-Picayune Publishing Company
After a spate of fires in FEMA trailers throughout the summer killed two people and injured three, New Orleans fire and federal officials urged trailer residents Wednesday to practice some common sense methods of fire prevention.
Above all, don’t smoke in the trailers. And if you can’t resist the urge to light up, do so only at a table with “a deep ashtray,” said New Orleans Fire Chief Norman Woodridge.
While neither Woodridge nor the Federal Emergency Management Agency acknowledged experimenting on the burn times for various travel trailers, both sides acknowledged the boxy units are essentially tinder.
“We want to let the public know how fast a situation can turn around on them if they’re not careful,” Woodridge said. “You’re in a confined space, you’re not going to be able to run.”
Since July 13, firefighters have responded to at least four trailer fires that killed or injured residents, officials said, and dozens of others that left people homeless. The fatal fires occurred in Harvey on July 15 and near Slidell on July 28. The first blaze was chalked up to a flash fire from propane that had built up in a stove; the second to smoking, officials said.
Those causes crop up again and again, Woodridge said, noting the Aug. 25 trailer fire in eastern New Orleans that left two people badly burned. In addition to smoking and propane leaks, the most common cause of trailer fires are cooking and electrical, officials said. Each FEMA trailer comes equipped with smoke detectors and a fire extinguisher, but officials said residents should adopt other basic measures, too.
“The propane will smell like sulfur or rotten eggs and if you smell that, get out, get the doors open,” said Ed Taylor, FEMA’s Direct Housing Operations inspector.
Other steps residents could take include keeping cooking mitts away from open flames and not using candles. If residents have questions, they should contact either their FEMA maintenance officers or the NOFD. They will either address questions over the phone or send a fire safety official to the trailer.
The officials made their comments in a news conference outside the trailer of Stephen Peychaud, who is restoring his flooded house in the 1500 block of Gov. Nicholls Street. Peychaud said his neighborhood, like others in Treme and throughout New Orleans, display a polka-dot kind of recovery, but that many of those involved have opted for the trailer.
But fires have broken out at trailers in the suburbs, as well, officials said.
Since the middle of July, news reports chronicled the death of a Harvey woman, bad burns suffered by a trailer resident in Kenner, a Barataria blaze that left a family homeless, the incineration of a smoker in his St. Tammany trailer, and the eastern New Orleans conflagration that left a man and a woman scorched but alive.
As of Wednesday, displaced flood victims occupied 58,734 trailers in a rough circle from the River Parishes, across the North Shore, and then over to Plaquemines, St. Bernard, Orleans and Jefferson parishes, according to FEMA officials who noted that the figure fluctuates daily.