New Owners

After waiting several months to get a FEMA trailer, my wife and I gave up. We are glad we did! We drove to Florida from Louisiana after losing our home to Hurricane Katrina. After looking at several RVs, we settled on a TM 3124KS. Towing it back to Louisiana with my Ford F-150 truck was a breeze; almost as if it wasn't there. It is large enough for our family of 3 and fits perfectly at our home in Slidell, LA. We will be staying in it several months while we repair our home. It is cosy, comfortable and easy to set up and a great alternative to living in a hotel. We are looking forward to some traveling and camping once our lives get back to normal. Thanks to everyone who posts to this forum. It has helped quite a bit.

dandeman

We have the same model and it is great. I am terribly sorry about your house, but very glad you chose the TM. Will hold you in our thoughts as you rebuild. Queeniereads aka Judi

[B_and_D]

I read or heard somewhere that out of the 100,000 FEMA trailers that were ordered, only about 10,000 of them have been actually delivered to people who need them and are actually occupying them. I don't know if this is still true, but the gov does move slowly and it sounds like it's incredibly frustrating to deal with FEMA. Supposedly there's a lot of red tape and kind of strange requirements about having the trailers installed on your property. One guy posted on another board that although his trailer was delivered, they wouldn't let him move into it or hook anything up power/water wise until he had a hard pvc connection for the water supply (which was then supposed to be hooked up with a hose). So he ran a hose from his water source under a shop on his property and hooked up a PVC pipe to the hose (under the shop) that then came up out of the ground next to the trailer. Then they let him hook it up (with a hose connected to the PVC pipe) and move in.

So sorry to hear about your house - hopefully your rebuilding will go smoothly and you can be back in it before too long.

Your TM will hopefully always hold a special place in your hearts because of the way it came into your lives. It will be nice to finally get everything settled and be able to take it somewhere fun and stay in it because you choose to!

Welcome to the board, and best of luck with your rebuilding.

Dee

[Bill]

Dee -

Yup, Government is slow - especially when you face the often-conflicting requirements of the Federal government and the local government. Of course, a basic part of the problem is that FEMA didn't have 100,000 trailers just sitting around. They had to go to the trailer manufacturers and order them, and wait for them to be built. And of course the trailer manufacturers didn't have 100,000 refrigerators, stoves, toilets, etc just sitting around - they had to be ordered from their suppliers. And so on.

Yes, it is disouragingly slow - but I'm not sure how it could have been done any better. If the Government had ordered (and paid for, and stored) 100,000 trailers years ago, just in case, there would have been loudly-expressed outrage about "Government waste". This is a no-win situation.

Bill

Well said! Queeniereads aka Judi

Thanks for the kind comments. We will actually be staying in our new TM Dec 9 for the first time. During that time we will be working on our home to get it repaired. As mentioned, we've had a time dealing with FEMA, insurance, etc. Interestingly enough we have received calls over the last 5 weeks asking if we wanted a FEMA trailer. We would reply yes and were always told that "Someone would be in touch". After 5 weeks of these calls, we gave up. I think we have the better end of the deal. We timed it right when closing on the 2005 TM as the dealer wanted to get some new models on his lot. So far we love everything about our TM and hope to do some future mods such as Solar power. This forum has been great in researching information. We are looking forward to brighter days ahead as I love to camp. The TM will open a whole new world for us. When the next storm comes, we'll bring our "home" with us instead of staying at a motel...

Dandeman