On the two-hour drive from Ellisville, MS to the New Orleans airport yesterday, my wonderfully entertaining driver Van T. pointed my attention to a vast sea of FEMA government trailers–thousands of them–parked in the pines along US 59. We passed by too quickly to get a photo that really does justice to the enormity of the site, but here’s what I was able to snap:

Now, here are a few wider pics that a ticked-off taxpayer took last fall:

And here’s vid someone took in 2006. Looks exactly what I saw yesterday:

There are another 20,000 of them sitting in Hope, Arkansas.

A flashback:

Mobile homes worth hundreds of millions of dollars are deteriorating in a muddy field in Arkansas and may never be used to house victims of Hurricane Katrina because of a dispute over where to install them, federal officials acknowledged Monday.

Only about 2,700 of the 25,000 mobile homes ordered at a cost of $850 million have been installed, and at least 10,000 are sitting in Hope, Ark., according to documents and statements from Federal Emergency Management Agency officials. Though about 55,000 Louisiana families are still waiting for a manufactured housing unit, the mobile homes may never be used because FEMA regulations prohibit them from being installed in flood-prone coastal areas, federal officials said.

Members of a Senate committee investigating the response to Hurricane Katrina called the mobile home episode an appalling example of government stumbling.

“These trailers are going to take the place of those very expensive toilet seats that we remember from Pentagon days,” said Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut. “It’s really absolutely unbelievable, and unacceptable.”

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, FEMA ordered far too many mobile homes and too few travel trailers, which are smaller, less expensive and more portable, and can be placed on lots in the disaster zone. The federal government had expected that Louisiana officials would identify sites inland where the mobile homes could be placed. But so far, with just a few exceptions, they has not done so, officials said.

“If sites for those mobile homes are not approved in Louisiana, it is possible they will never be used for hurricane relief,” said Nicol Andrews, a FEMA spokesman.

The report on the mobile homes, as well as widespread fraud in FEMA’s emergency assistance to hurricane victims, came as the federal government’s top three domestic security and disaster relief officials vowed to fix flaws in the nation’s emergency response programs.

All worth remembering as Washington once again closes in on another massive funding package to “fix” the housing crisis brought on by the subprime mess.

Government doesn’t fix problems. It exacerbates them.

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