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Concerns About Formaldehyde Have Only Grown Since FEMA Trailer Revelations
By Becky Gillette
May 6, 2008 - 11:18:43 AM

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(HealthNewsDigest.com) - Is formaldehyde the most hazardous substance found in building materials since asbestos, or is all the attention to formaldehyde causing undue concerns about a common chemical widely used in building materials for decades?

Formaldehyde is used in adhesives to make building materials such as particleboard and plywood. As these materials age, the formaldehyde can come out as a gas. Formaldehyde has been much in the news recently with the decision by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to move people out of Hurricane Katrina and Rita FEMA trailers on the Gulf Coast before summer because of high formaldehyde levels found in the indoor air (http://www.cdc.gov/nceh/ehhe/trailerstudy).

Adding fuel to the fire was a recent report that people reporting workplace exposure to formaldehyde levels have higher incidences of Lou Gehrig’s disease, also known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a fatal neurodegenerative disease (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/n...ory_63516.html).

I got involved in this issue after Hurricane Katrina when many of my friends on the Gulf Coast were housed in FEMA trailers. The formaldehyde was so bad in some of the trailers that people were experiencing bloody noses, headaches, rashes, burning eyes and throat, respiratory problems and extreme fatigue.

Any debate about long-term health effects like cancer aside, the short-term impacts of being exposed to high formaldehyde levels were alarming and a major impediment to people being able to rebuild their homes and otherwise recover from losing everything in the storm.

Early in 2006, I applied for funding from Sierra Club to testing to determine how widespread the problem was. When we went public with the first test results in April 2006 showing that 83 percent of the campers had high formaldehyde levels, FEMA said that people just needed to air out the campers and the problem would go away.

We continued to test and found even higher levels in the summer when outgassing of formaldehyde is worse because of heat and humidity. We also continued to test in 2007 and determined the problem wasn’t going away. We found 61 out of 69 tests--or 88 percent-- were over 0.1 ppm—the level at which EPA and other agencies agree that health effects can occur. When you use the much lower limits recommended by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) for long-term exposure, not a single trailer was safe.

Out of 17 brands of trailers tested, all had at least one high test. And there were three deaths of people in the trailers that tested high that we were concerned could have been caused by the formaldehyde.

There have been reports that the problems with FEMA trailers were caused by manufacturers’ rush to produce the large amount of emergency housing needed after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. And there has been some speculation that cheap particleboard imported from China elevated the formaldehyde levels.

Manufacturers deny any shortcuts for building the FEMA housing, and claim they used the same processes to make FEMA trailers as to make units for sale to the general public. I believe them because I have talked to numerous people who spent large sums of money to purchase a RV only to find the air quality so bad they can’t stand to stay in them. Testing has shown levels of formaldehyde as high as 0.42 ppm in a trailer purchased by Marvin Motes of Vancleave, Miss.

Motes has been very frustrated in not being able to either get the manufacturer to fix the problem or take the trailer back and refund his investment.

“My heart goes out to anyone who has had to live in any of the campers that are contaminated with formaldehyde,” Motes said. “After owning my camper for over two years and using it only a very few times and becoming sick each time, I now have a very expensive ‘yard ornament’. In other words I own a camper that is totally useless to me and my wife.”

Many people who have tested their private RV’s have found high levels of formaldehyde (see blogs at www.toxictrailers.com). I’ve now tested trailers from 2004 natural disasters that still have high formaldehyde levels. Many people from earlier natural disasters purchased their trailers from FEMA, but they aren’t getting the same assistance moving out of the toxic trailers as is now being provided to victims of Katrina and Rita.

I’ve also heard from people who have been poisoned by formaldehyde in office buildings including a California EPA office in Sacramento where a woman won a worker’s compensation case for formaldehyde exposure. And when Congress held hearings on formaldehyde in FEMA trailers in July 2007, Congresswoman Rep. Diane Watson, told about being poisoned by formaldehyde when her government office building was remodeled.

Formaldehyde is also a problem with other types of manufactured housing such as portable classrooms. Testing by the California Air Resources Board (CARB) revealed unacceptably high levels of formaldehyde in the portable classrooms.

As daunting as this problem is, some progress is being made. FEMA recently announced that it the future it will only purchase emergency housing that is low in formaldehyde, not testing over 0.016 ppm. CARB standards have recently been adopted that will greatly reduce formaldehyde emissions in building materials in California. The Recreational Vehicles Industry Association (RVIA) has announced it will voluntary adopt the CARB standards, and a manufacturer is planning to produce a formaldehyde-free RV made from composite materials.

Those are good steps, but more needs to be done. All people deserve to be protected from formaldehyde, so the Sierra Club and 20 other organizations have recently petitioned EPA to adopt the CARB standards nationwide. (See http://www.sierraclub.org/toxics).

In the 21st century, there are alternatives to formaldehyde and things that can be done to prevent outgassing from building materials that do use formaldehyde. A formaldehyde fix is long overdue.

Note about author: Becky Gillette is a free-lance writer who headed up testing of FEMA trailers for formaldehyde for the Sierra Club. Her work has appeared in more than 40 national publications including E, The Environmental Magazine, Omni, BioScience, Biocycle, Ladies’ Home Journal and Organic Gardening. She won the National Conservation Achievement Award from the National Wildlife Federation in 2002 in the area of communications. She is currently a consultant to Sierra Club working as director of the club’s formaldehyde campaign.

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