NFPA Journal - November/December 2017 - 76

housing in the form of hotel rooms or
apartments for people who lost their
homes and have no other housing alternatives. FEMA is already is paying for
tens of thousands of displaced Harvey
victims to stay in hotels and motels in
33 states, according to the Associated
Press. Administrator Brock Long has
reiterated that the manufactured housing option will be a last resort, and
that he will work with officials in Texas
and Florida to come up with ways to
get people back into their homes more
quickly without relying on FEMA
housing.
"We don't have enough FEMA units
for all the homes that were destroyed,"
he said in mid-September at a briefing
in Washington. "If you combine Harvey
and Irma, this is an extraordinary event
that is going to require innovative
solutions when it comes to housing."
For thousands of homeless people
with uninhabitable homes and limited
resources, however, the FEMA homes
may be their only viable option.
Getting a family into a FEMA home
is not always a short or simple process. Assembling and processing the
paperwork to demonstrate need takes
time; manufacturers need time to
ramp up production of the units, and it
takes time for the units to be shipped.
When a family is approved and the
unit arrives at the staging area, it takes

additional time to pull the necessary
permits, and more still to find somewhere to locate the unit that is safe,
legal, and has access to reliable, working utilities. Even if those obstacles can
be overcome, finding capable contractors with time to do the work can be
a significant challenge in the wake of
a major disaster, further delaying the
process. The first families in Southeast
Texas to receive FEMA homes began
moving in in early October, about five
weeks after the hurricane struck. Many
more remain on a waiting list.
"Last year's Louisiana flooding was
really the first test of this whole concept, the first time we actually told
manufacturers to crank up into their
full potential," McKenna said. "There
were issues, but we worked through
them gradually." In a normal year,
FEMA deploys about 800 of its emergency housing units to disaster events,
he said. The 2016 Louisiana flooding
demanded almost 5,000 units in a
matter of months.
From a sprinkler standpoint, the
biggest difficulty proved to be securing
parts for the external pump and tank
assembly, which led to production
delays. Today, about a third of the 3,000
sprinklered FEMA units shipped to
Louisiana are still without the tank and
pump systems, rendering the sprinkler
systems inoperable, McKenna said. The

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storm also struck before FEMA had
any program or training materials in
place for the contractors tasked with
installing the innovative systems, which
increased the difficulty of finding contractors who could do the job, despite
the intention to make the system a
simple plug-and-play design.
Those lessons should help as the
agency takes on the even bigger task
of responding to Harvey and Maria.
Manufacturers working with FEMA
have made assurances that there will be
no supply issues, that parts will be in
place, and that units will be delivered
on time. A training program has been
developed for installers, and McKenna
and others have been in the Houston
area training the FEMA staff that will
be overseeing the sprinkler installation
contractors. The team has also made
minor engineering tweaks to how
the tank and pump connects to the
sprinkler system, which should make
installation even easier. At least that's
the hope.
"Things are always changing, and
that forces you to adapt and react,"
McKenna said. "With everything you do
there are always ways to make things
better, always places where you can
find improvements. That's exactly what
we did."
JESSE ROMAN is associate editor of NFPA Journal.

GETT Y IMAGES

SURVIVOR FOCUS Trailers housing people whose homes were destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
FEMA officials hope sprinklers and other upgrades to the agency's new-generation emergency housing
result in a safer, less traumatic experience for people in transition.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of NFPA Journal - November/December 2017