By Isabel Macdonald and Isabeau Doucet
Structurally unsafe and laced with
formaldehyde, the "hurricane-proof" classroom trailers installed by
the Clinton Foundation in Haiti came from the same company being sued for
sickening Hurricane Katrina victims.
Editor’s Note: This article was reported
in partnership with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute,
with additional support from the Canadian
Centre for Investigative Reporting.
When Demosthene Lubert heard that Bill Clinton’s foundation was going to rebuild his collapsed school at the epicenter of Haiti’s January 12, 2010, earthquake, in the coastal city of Léogâne, the academic director thought he was "in paradise."
The
project was announced by Clinton as his foundation’s first contribution to the
Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, which the former president co-chairs. The
foundation described the project as "hurricane-proof…emergency shelters
that can also serve as schools…to ensure the safety of vulnerable populations
in high risk areas during the hurricane season," while also providing
Haitian schoolchildren "a decent place to learn" and creating local
jobs. The facilities, according to the foundation, would be equipped with power
generators, restrooms, water and sanitary storage. They became one of the
IHRC’s first projects.
However,
when Nation reporters visited the
"hurricane-proof" shelters in June, six to eight months after they’d
been installed, we found them to consist of twenty imported prefab trailers
beset by a host of problems, from mold to sweltering heat to shoddy construction.
Most disturbing, they were manufactured by the same company, Clayton Homes,
that is being sued in the United States for providing the Federal Emergency
Management Agency (FEMA) with formaldehyde-laced trailers in the wake of
Hurricane Katrina. Air samples collected from twelve Haiti trailers detected
worrying levels of this carcinogen in one, according to laboratory results
obtained as part of a joint investigation by The Nation and The
Nation Institute’s Investigative Fund.
Clayton
Homes is owned by Berkshire Hathaway, the holding company run by Warren
Buffett, one of the "notable" private-sector members of the Clinton
Global Initiative, according to the initiative’s website. ("Members"
are typically required to pay $20,000 a year to the charity, but foundation officials
would not disclose whether Buffett had made such a donation.) Buffett was also
a prominent Hillary Clinton supporter during the 2008 presidential race, and he
co-hosted a fundraiser that brought in at least $1 million for her campaign.
By
mid-June, two of the four schools where the Clinton Foundation classrooms were
installed had prematurely ended classes for the summer because the temperature
in the trailers frequently exceeded 100 degrees, and one had yet to open for
lack of water and sanitation facilities.
As Judith
Seide, a student in Lubert’s sixth-grade class, explained to The Nation, she and her classmates regularly suffer
from painful headaches in their new Clinton Foundation classroom. Every day,
she said, her "head hurts and I feel it spinning and have to stop moving,
otherwise I’d fall." Her vision goes dark, as is the case with her
classmate Judel, who sometimes can’t open his eyes because, said Seide,
"he’s allergic to the heat." Their teacher regularly relocates the
class outside into the shade of the trailer because the swelter inside is
insufferable.
Sitting
in the sixth-grade classroom, student Mondialie Cineas, who dreams of becoming
a nurse, said that three times a week the teacher gives her and her classmates
painkillers so that they can make it through the school day. "At noon, the
class gets so hot, kids get headaches," the 12-year-old said, wiping beads
of sweat from her brow. She is worried because "the kids feel sick, can’t
work, can’t advance to succeed."
Word
about the students’ headaches has made it all the way to the Léogâne mayor’s
office, but like the students, their teachers and parents, Mayor Santos Alexis
chalked it up to the intense heat inside the trailers.
*
* *
But
headaches were not the only health problems students, staff and parents at the
Institut Haitiano-Caribbean (INHAC) told us they’ve suffered from since the
inauguration of the classrooms. Innocent Sylvain, a shy janitor who looks much
older than his 41 years, spends more time than anyone in the new trailer
classrooms, with the inglorious task of mopping up the water that leaks through
the doors and windows each time it rains. He has felt a burning sensation in
his eyes ever since he began working long hours in the trailers. One of his
eyes is completely bloodshot, and he said, "They itch and burn." He’d
previously been sensitive to eye irritation, but he says he’s had worse
"problems since the month of January"—when the schoolrooms opened
their doors.
Any
number of factors might be contributing to the headaches and eye irritation
reported by INHAC staff and students. However, similar symptoms were
experienced by those living in the FEMA trailers that were found by the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention to have unsafe levels of formaldehyde. Lab
tests conducted as part of our investigation in Haiti discovered levels of the
carcinogen in the sixth-grade Clinton Foundation classroom in Léogâne at 250
parts per billion—two and a half times the level at which the CDC warned FEMA
trailer residents that sensitive people, such as children, could face adverse
health effects. Assay Technologies, the accredited lab that analyzed the air
tests, identifies 100 parts per billion and more as the level at which "65–80
percent of the population will most likely exhibit some adverse health
symptoms…when exposed continually over extended periods of time."
Randy
Maddalena, a scientist specializing in indoor pollutants at Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory, characterized the 250 parts per billion finding as "a
very high level" of formaldehyde and warned that "it’s of
concern," particularly given the small sample size. An elevated level of
formaldehyde in one of twelve trailers tested is comparable to the formaldehyde
emissions problems detected in about 9 percent of similar Clayton mobile homes
supplied by FEMA after Hurricane Katrina. Maddalena explained that in
"normal" buildings, you’ll see rates twelve to twenty-five times
lower than 250 parts per billion, "and even that’s considered above
regulatory thresholds."
According
to the CDC, formaldehyde exposure can exacerbate symptoms of asthma and has
been linked to chronic lung disease. Studies have shown that children are
particularly vulnerable to its respiratory effects. The chemical was recently
added to the US Department of Health and Human Services’ "Report of
Carcinogens," based on studies linking exposure to formaldehyde with
increased risk for rare types of cancer.
"You
should get those kids outta there," Maddalena said. The scientist
emphasized that Haiti’s hot and humid climate could well be contributing to
high emissions of the carcinogen in the classroom. Indeed, months before the
launch of the Clinton trailer project, the nation’s climate was widely cited as
a key problem with a trailer industry proposal to ship FEMA trailers to Haiti
for shelter after the earthquake. The proposal was ultimately rejected by FEMA,
following a critical letter from Bennie Thompson, chair of the House Committee
on Homeland Security, who argued, "This country’s immediate response to
help in this humanitarian crisis should not be blemished by later concerns over
adverse health consequences precipitated by our efforts."
Yet
several months later, the Knoxville News Sentinel reported that Clayton Homes had been
awarded a million-dollar contract to ship twenty trailers to Haiti, for use as
classrooms for schoolchildren. The Clinton Foundation claims it went through a
bidding process before awarding the contract to Clayton Homes, which was
already embroiled in the FEMA trailer lawsuit. But despite repeated requests,
the foundation has not provided The Nationwith any
documentation of this process.
There are
hints that Clayton Homes aggressively pursued the contract. For example, a
company press release dated August 6, 2010, notes, "When former President
Bill Clinton was named to head the relief effort, Clayton’s Director of
International Development, Paul Thomas, called the Clinton Foundation to see if
there was a way to help."
The chief
of staff for the office of the UN Special Envoy, Garry Conille, emphasized that
the foundation’s decision-making on the project took place in a context of
great urgency, with the advent of the 2010 hurricane season, when 1.5 million
people were living in tent camps. "Under the circumstances, with all these
people exposed, with the first rains," said Conille, "it would have
been completely acceptable to go to a single source, but we didn’t."
The
Clinton Foundation’s chief operating officer, Laura Graham, said in a phone
interview that the contract was awarded to Clayton on the basis of a
"limited request for proposals" from nine companies. She added that
the decision was informed by "recommendations from a panel including a lot
of these experts that do this work for a living, and Clayton was recommended as
the most cost-efficient, with the best product and with the strongest Haitian
partner." She clarified that she did not participate in the bidding
process but said there were "representatives from the foundation as well
as [the UN] Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs [OCHA], the UN
Special Envoy Office and the International Organization for Migration [IOM]…and
there was a request for proposals run by them."
According
to Bradley Mellicker, IOM’s Port-au-Prince–based emergency preparedness and
response officer, however, "the Clinton Foundation paid for the containers
through a no-bid process." Imogen Wall, former spokeswoman for OCHA
in Haiti, responded by e-mail that OCHA never deals with procurement or project
management.
The
Nation made multiple attempts to reach
Bill Clinton for comment. However, the former president, known for championing
the role of nonprofits in global affairs ("Unlike the government, we don’t
have to be quite as worried about a bad story in the newspapers," he
recently said in a speech), never responded. A Clayton Homes official referred
all queries regarding the contract to the Clinton Foundation.
When he
heard that the new classrooms in his community had been built by a FEMA formaldehyde
litigation defendant, Santos Alexis, Léogâne’s stately mayor, said, "I
hope these are not the same trailers that made people sick in the US. Otherwise
I would be very critical; it would be chaos." (They are indeed different
trailers, according to an engineer at Clayton Homes, who said the new
classrooms were constructed specifically for the Clinton Foundation’s Haiti
project.)
"It
would be humiliating to us, and we’ll take this as a black thing," the
mayor added, drawing a parallel between his community in Haiti, the world’s
first black republic, and the disproportionate numbers of African-Americans
affected by the US government’s mismanagement of the emergency response after
Hurricane Katrina.
* * *
Demosthene
Lubert’s disappointment is palpable as he sits in one of his new-smelling
classrooms, perspiration dripping from his face. He had envisioned that the
foundation of the former US president would rebuild INHAC, his school, as a
modern institution with solar panel–powered lights and Wi-Fi. At a meeting of
the Clinton Global Initiative in May, Dr. Paul Farmer, Clinton’s deputy UN
special envoy, called for healthcare to be integrated into schools. At the very
least, Lubert expected the Clinton Foundation, which is active in global health
philanthropy and cholera prevention in Haiti, to help with school sanitation.
"I
thought the grand foundation of Clinton was going to build us latrines and dig
us wells for the children to wash their hands before meals and after using the
toilet…especially as we’re at the mercy of cholera," Lubert says with a
sigh. Less than an hour north of Léogâne, in Carrefour, the number of cholera
cases went from eighty-five per week at the end of April to 820 a week at the
beginning of June, according to Sylvain Groulx, country director of Médecins
Sans Frontières. The disease, which is preventable with proper sanitary
conditions, has killed 5,500 people since the epidemic began last October.
The
Clinton Foundation did not build so much as a latrine at the school, or at any of
the three other schools where its trailers were installed. (INHAC and two of
the other schools had a limited number of pre-existing outhouses, which the
school directors saw as inadequate, while the fourth did not have a single
outhouse, making it unusable, according to the school’s director.)
Conille,
Clinton’s chief of staff at his UN office, acknowledged in a telephone
interview that the trailer classrooms "would never meet the standards for
school building" under Haitian or international regulations.
"Normally
when you hear ‘Clin-ton,’ when people speak of ‘Clin-ton,’ the name ‘Clin-ton’
carries a lot of weight," says Lubert. He trails off, looking suddenly
uncertain. Clinton’s name echoes ambiguously through the swampy chemical air
like a plea, a mantra or a brand.
June 1st marked the beginning of Haiti’s 2011 hurricane season, and meteorologists
project that Haiti could face up to eighteen tropical storms with three to six
of these developing to hurricane strength. Léogâne, where 95 percent of the
downtown area was flooded by Hurricane Tomas last year, is relying on the
Clinton Foundation’s trailers as Plan A in the municipality’s emergency
response.
The
foundation’s original proposal to the IHRC referred to the buildings it planned
to construct in Léogâne as "hurricane-proof" shelters, and this past
March, Clinton Foundation foreign policy director Ami Desai reiterated that
claim in a phone interview. On the foundation website, the promotional write-up
about the trailers is featured under the heading "Emergency Hurricane
Shelter Project."
Larry
Tanner, a wind science specialist at Texas Tech University, was
"suspicious" when he heard that trailers were to be used as hurricane
shelters in Haiti. Tanner thought it unlikely that Clayton Homes had developed a
mobile home that could safely be used as a hurricane shelter, saying in a
telephone interview that he put the odds at "slim to none." Mobile
homes are considered by FEMA to be so unsafe in hurricanes that the agency
unequivocally advises the public to evacuate them.
In an
interview with The Nation, Clayton Homes engineer
Mark Izzo said the Léogâne trailers could withstand winds of up to 140 miles
per hour. The company arrived at this figure through calculations, he said,
rather than testing.
But
Tanner emphasizes that such structures must be rigorously tested for resistance
to high winds and projectiles. Clayton Homes’s failure to test the trailers
meant that they would not meet the international construction standard for
hurricane shelter. "It certainly would not be accepted by FEMA
either," Tanner added. Moreover, the kind of anchoring systems used by the
trailers in Léogâne—which rely on metal straps to attach the shelter to the
ground—"fail routinely," according to Tanner.
Two weeks
into Haiti’s hurricane season, The Nation visited
some of the Clinton shelters with Kit Miyamoto, a California-based structural
engineer contracted by USAID and the Haitian government to assess the safety of
buildings in Port-au-Prince. Standing in front of one of the trailers, Miyamoto
looked doubtful when asked whether, in his professional view, these structures
were, as the Clinton Foundation has repeatedly claimed,
"hurricane-proof." In the world of engineering, buildings are rarely
considered to be truly hurricane-proof, explained Miyamoto, who said he had
never heard of a wooden trailer being used as a hurricane shelter, let alone
being referred to as a hurricane-proof building. "To be hurricane-proof
you a need a heavier structure with concrete or blocks," he explained.
Miyamoto
emphasized that one of the most crucial elements for the public safety was how
well the shelters’ limitations were explained to the community expected to use
them. "Hopefully people do understand that these windows do need to be
protected if a major hurricane is expected to be coming," he said.
Miyamoto said the likelihood is "really high" that the windows will
break without storm shutters, and "once those window systems break,"
he explained, making a toppling motion with his arms, "you cannot just be
in there." The roof will "pop off."
When
asked if the shelters had come with any storm shutters, Andre Hercule, director
of Saint Thérèse de Darbonne elementary school, which has also received Clinton
trailers, shook his head, then grabbed the nearest open trailer window and
effortlessly slid it shut. Clicking it locked, he explained, "We’d close
all the windows." The school director remains confident after hearing
Clinton speak at a news conference in August 2010 at his school that the trailers
are hurricane-proof.
Léogâne’s
Department of Civil Protection may also be operating on this assumption. At the
Léogâne town hall, a derelict white paint-chipped building that looks stately
in contrast to the seventeen-month-old tent camp nearby, DCP coordinator
Philippe Joseph explained the municipality’s plans for community outreach in
the event of a hurricane. "We’ll send scouts with megaphones and tell
people to gather their papers and go to the Clinton Foundation shelters,"
he said as he sketched a rough map, indicating the best routes to the
dual-purpose school buildings from the geographic zones most vulnerable to
storms.
Asked if
he believed the trailers would offer adequate protection during a hurricane,
Joseph seemed taken aback: Clinton had himself said that these were
hurricane-proof shelters, he said.
*
* *
In a
jungly field on the outskirts of Léogâne, four of the twenty Clinton classrooms
sit empty at another school, Coeur de Jesus. Because of the trailers’ leaky
roofs, puddles form on the floor that need to be mopped up by the maintenance
staff. As school director Antoine Beauvais explained, the new
sixteen-by-forty-foot trailers were too bulky to fit in the cramped residential
area where his school was previously located. But for lack of toilet facilities
or running water provided by the foundation for the newly created remote
campus, the school has been unable to use its new trailer classrooms.
When The Nation visited the site with Miyamoto, at
least one strap on a trailer slated to be used as a hurricane shelter in the
coming months was already loose. As Miyamoto moved the slack metal ribbon that
is meant to ensure the trailer stays stable during a storm, the structural
engineer remarked that these kinds of anchoring systems are liable to corrode.
"You definitely want to look at it at least once a year," he said
grimly.
It’s
unclear whether such maintenance will occur. Clayton Homes recently visited
some of the schools after the International Organization for Migration, which
works with the UN, raised concerns about the condition of the shelters.
However, Conille said he did not know anything about plans the Clinton
Foundation had made for the maintenance of the "hurricane shelters"
in the longer term. The Haitian contractor who was initially hired to help
install the shelters, Philippe Cinéas of AC Construction, said that neither he
nor his staff were trained to service them. This raised concerns for Cinéas
because, as he knew from experience, "in Haiti maintenance is always a
problem."
While
Clinton Foundation COO Laura Graham claims that the foundation has always been
"very accessible" to the school and municipal officials in Léogâne,
neither the school directors nor the civil protection coordinator had any way
of getting in touch with the foundation, they told The Nation,and had to resort to going through
intermediaries.
Joseph,
the DCP chief for Léogâne, faults the trailer project for being decided from
afar and "from the top down," like so much of Haiti relief. While the
Clinton Foundation claims that it worked with local government to implement the
shelter plan, Joseph disputes this. The foundation simply informed him that it
was building four schools in his district, he says. "To me this is not a
consultation," the local official remarked. "To consult people you have
to ask them what they need and how they think it could best be
implemented."
Joseph
ascribes the new shelters’ "infernal" heat, humidity and other
problems to this lack of on-the-ground consultation. He added, with regret,
that people in desperate need of employment and shelters watched as "the
Clinton Foundation came in with all its specialists and equipment, but they
didn’t give any training." He said that "if they use a local firm
they will not only create jobs in a community that has been decapitalized by
the quake but they will also take into account the environmental reality on the
ground."
In the
proposal approved by the IHRC, the Clinton Foundation said that "up to 300
local workers would be employed to build the schools." Cinéas said there
were only five to eight people hired by his firm on a very temporary basis, and
the foundation declined to comment on what additional jobs were created.
Farmer,
the Clinton envoy, recently published a report on trends in Haiti’s
dysfunctional aid system. He stressed the need for "accompaniment" to
be the guiding principle of Haiti’s reconstruction, with Haitians "in the
driver’s seat" and the international community listening to their
priorities. Farmer also emphasized the importance of local procurement and job
creation.
It is
hard to imagine a better case study of the very opposite approach than the
Clinton trailers. In response to questions about what due diligence the
foundation did to ensure the safety of the trailers it purchased for use as
hurricane shelters, the Clinton Foundation initially insisted that the most
appropriate person to speak to was a Haitian employee of Clinton’s UN Office.
When Graham, the foundation’s COO, finally agreed to talk about the project on
the record, she denied that the foundation had been responsible for any due
diligence regarding its own project, claiming that those responsible were a
"panel of experts," including one point person from the foundation,
Greg Milne, and representatives of other organizations. (Milne referred all
questions to the foundation’s press office.) The Clinton Foundation agreed to
furnish documentation of who was on this panel but by press time had not done
so.
Graham
said that the staff of the Clinton Foundation—which has for more than a year
publicized the "hurricane shelters" that "President
Clinton" built in Léogâne—are "not experts" in hurricane shelter
construction. She claimed the same "panel of experts" would have been
responsible for due diligence to ensure air quality of the shelters whose secondary
purpose was as classrooms.
Explaining
Bill Clinton’s rationale for the trailers, which were installed at the tail end
of the 2010 hurricane season, Conille said, "It was not meant to be
sustainable. It was meant because we didn’t want to have dead people in
September." According to Conille, Clinton was deeply troubled by what
would happen to the women and children in case of a serious storm—and as the
former president felt that "no one" was doing anything about the
issue, he took the lead himself. Moreover, Clinton didn’t want to have his new
"hurricane shelters" sitting empty while schoolchildren had classes
in tents, Conille added.
Yet
according to Maddalena, given the high rate of formaldehyde found in one of the
classrooms, and the children’s headaches, "they’d be better off studying
outside under a tarp."
Wall, the
former OCHA spokeswoman, responded by e-mail, "We all knew that that
project was misconceived from the start, a classic example of aid designed from
a distance with no understanding of ground level realities or needs. It has had
a predictably long and unhappy history from the start."
Even
Conille largely concurred, in a telephone interview, that there were many
problems with the project, saying, "It made sense at that time, and I
guess someone could argue it wasn’t the best idea in retrospect."
For his
part, Léogâne Mayor Santos Alexis says he is still waiting for Bill Clinton to
follow through on his pledge to equip Léogâne with hurricane-proof school
buildings. Asked about his view on the Clinton Foundation’s claims to having
completed an "Emergency Hurricane Shelter Project" replete with new
classrooms for his town, Alexis is defiant. "If those at the Clinton
Foundation are sure it’s done then they should prove it, they should show it to
us, because I know nothing about it," he remarked coyly, gazing out from
behind his shades. Seated at his desk in a crumbling municipal building, the
mayor said he is still waiting for the real Clinton Foundation schools,
"built with norms that protect people from hurricanes and flooding."
*****
Correction:
This article originally quoted IOM’s Bradley Mellicker stating, "That’s a
lie," after the quotation from the Clinton Foundation’s COO Laura Graham
claiming that IOM had played a role in the procurement process for the
trailers. While IOM played no role, Mellicker’s statement was made in response
to a claim by a different Clinton Foundation source that IOM had led the
procurement process, and not in response to Laura Graham. We regret the
error. The Nation understands that the Clinton Foundation
and the Office of the Special Envoy looked at a list of unsolicited offers and
picked a winner and that there was no public bid.
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