FEMA gets mobile home assembly lines rolling for evacuees
FEMA spokesman Butch Kinerney said the specific number of units and dollar totals were not immediately available Tuesday evening.
The nation’s largest mobile home manufacturer, Clayton Homes Inc. of Maryville, received a government order Tuesday to build 2,000 single-wide models, company spokesman Chris Nicely said, with delivery requested by Dec. 1.
“That won’t be a problem,” Nicely said.
But some manufacturers have complained that FEMA’s pace of responding to bids they submitted by Sept. 9 could mean production delays. FEMA officials earlier said they did not want to make spending decisions too hastily.
Riverside, Calif.-based Fleetwood Enterprises Inc. received orders for 7,500 travel trailers and 3,000 single-section mobile homes, Elden L. Smith, the company’s president and chief executive officer, said in a statement on its Web site Tuesday.
Smith said the “total value of the order to our company is upwards of $170 million.”
FEMA spokeswoman Nicol Andrews said Monday that at least 30,000 travel trailers would be ready in Louisiana by Oct. 18, with another 170,000 to be installed soon after.
State officials were working to identify plots of land where the trailers could be placed and outfitted with plumbing and electricity, Andrews said.
Andrews said FEMA awarded another contract to Fluor Corp. of Aliso Viejo, Calif., to build temporary housing units and that other contracts were pending.
Clayton — which had already shipped 1,800 homes from retail lots as far away as Delaware and Wyoming to a FEMA staging area at Texarkana, Texas — submitted a bid to build 3,000 units, but FEMA ordered only 2,000.
“I think they are trying to spread it around, to keep everybody happy and so they don’t get delayed by a bottleneck in one operation,” Nicely said.
Nicely declined to provide his company’s price information but said the single-wide units typically range in cost from $25,000 to $35,000. He said the mobile homes would likely be built at Clayton plants “closest to the Gulf,” including some in Texas, Georgia and Tennessee.
FEMA estimates Katrina displaced 200,000 households, far more than the 15,000 households that needed shelter last year after the Florida hurricanes last year.
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On the Net:
Manufactured Housing Institute: http://www.manufacturedhousing.org
Federal Emergency Management Agency: http://www.fema.gov