The chopping block might seem like the logical destination for thousands of formaldehyde-filled mobile homes that sickened Hurricane Katrina victims and embarrassed the Federal Emergency Management Agency—but nearly 120,000 of the tainted trailers ended up on the auction block instead.

Despite health and environmental concerns and fears of a market deluge, FEMA auctioned most of the remaining Katrina trailers on January 29, according to the Washington Post. The sale is expected to be final April 3, after an antitrust review by the Justice Department, the paper stated.

“This is like history repeating itself,” Marty Horine, who bought a FEMA trailer in 2007, told the Post. “People are all going to buy them, move into them and then start getting sick.”

The trailers, most of which are travel models, are not meant to be used for housing and bear a warning sticker to that effect. Although formaldehyde might still be present, officials believe they’ll be safe for recreational use, according to the article. They also claim the trailers are in such bad shape that no one would want to live in them.

Critics think that saying the trailers won’t be used for housing is disingenuous. In a March 16 op-ed piece, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson stated that “no warning sticker can absolve the government, the wholesalers and the eventual retailers of these trailers and mobile homes of their moral responsibility.”

“Given the state of the economy,” he wrote, “…it is lunacy to pretend that families will not buy these units as primary residences.”

The general manager of Ohio-based Greenlawn Homes, the highest bidder for the chemical-laden trailers, seemed to support critics' claims that they would be used despite the warnings. He told the Columbus Dispatch that the trailers are “not junk,” and the Washington Post that formaldehyde contamination was a “non-topic” consumers don’t ask about.

In addition to formaldehyde, some lawmakers worry about the market effects of releasing a bevy of low-priced mobile homes. Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., has asked Attorney General Eric Holder to review any antitrust determination related to the trailers' sale.

“The trailer industry estimates 2010 sales at approximately 200,000 units, however the government is now further complicating matters by adding an additional 100,000 trailers into the marketplace,” Thompson stated in a press release. “So we now face both the health and safety risk of these units, and the added economic impact on an already depressed industry.”

Although still concerned about health risks, Thompson supported a failed plan in January to send the trailers to Haiti, according to an Associated Press article. That scheme was likely motivated by a desire to keep the trailers off the market as well, according to the AP article.

From FEMA's perspective, there’s little choice but to offload the 145,000 homes, which it bought for $2.7 billion in 2005 and has paid more than $220 million to store, according to the Post. Although the agency will clear less than $280 million on the 130,000 trailers it auctioned, FEMA Associate Deputy Administrator David Garratt indicated the bigger value might come from closing the book on the whole sordid tale.

“I'm certainly hopeful we're approaching the end of the story for the Katrina units…” he told the Post. “I'm hopeful we can reduce the inventory of units which we can no longer use, and actively maintain the units we can use in actual disasters.”