Stumbling Storm-Aid
Effort Put Tons
of Ice on Trips to
Nowhere
By SCOTT SHANE and
ERIC LIPTON, NYTimes on the Web, October 2, 2005
WASHINGTON, Oct. 1 -- When the
definitive story of the confrontation between Hurricane Katrina and the United
States government is finally told, one long and tragicomic chapter will have to
be reserved for the odyssey of the ice.
Ninety-one thousand tons of ice cubes, that is, intended to cool food, medicine
and sweltering victims of the storm. It would cost taxpayers more than
$100 million, and most of it would never be delivered.
The somewhat befuddled heroes of the tale will be truckers like Mark Kostinec,
who was dropping a load of beef in Canton, Ohio, on Sept. 2 when his dispatcher
called with an urgent government job: Pick up 20 tons of ice in
Greenville, Pa., and take it to Carthage, Mo., a staging area for the Federal
Emergency Management Agency.
Mr. Kostinec, 40, a driver for Universe Truck Lines of Omaha, was happy to help
with the crisis. But at Carthage, instead of unloading, he was told to
take his 2,000 bags of ice on to Montgomery, Ala.
After a day and a half in Montgomery, he was sent to Camp Shelby, in
Mississippi. From there, on Sept. 8, he was waved onward to Selma, Ala.
And after two days in Selma he was redirected to Emporia, Va., along with scores
of other frustrated drivers who had been following similarly circuitous routes.
At Emporia, Mr. Kostinec sat for an entire week, his trailer burning fuel around
the clock to keep the ice frozen, as FEMA officials studied whether supplies
originally purchased for Hurricane Katrina might be used for Hurricane Ophelia.
But in the end only 3 of about 150 ice trucks were sent to North Carolina, he
said. So on Sept. 17, Mr. Kostinec headed to Fremont, Neb., where he
unloaded his ice into a government-rented storage freezer the next day.
"I dragged that ice around for 4,100 miles, and it never got used," Mr. Kostinec
said. A former mortgage broker and Enron computer technician, he had
learned to roll with the punches, and he was pleased to earn $4,500 for the
trip, double his usual paycheck. He was perplexed, however, by the
government's apparent bungling.
"They didn't seem to know how much ice they were buying and how much they were
using," he said. "All the truckers said the money was good. But we
were upset about not being able to help."
In the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Mr. Kostinec's government-ordered
meandering was not unusual. Partly because of the mass evacuation forced
by Hurricane Katrina, and partly because of what an inspector general's report
this week called a broken system for tracking goods at FEMA, the agency ordered
far more ice than could be distributed to people who needed it.
Over about a week after the storm, FEMA ordered 211 million pounds of ice for
Hurricane Katrina, said Rob Holland, a spokesman for the Army Corps of
Engineers, which buys the ice that FEMA requests under a contract with IAP
Worldwide Services of Cape Canaveral, Fla. The company won the contract in
competitive bidding in 2002, Mr. Holland said.
Officials eventually realized that that much ice was overkill, and managed to
cancel some of the orders. But the 182 million pounds actually supplied
turned out to be far more than could be delivered to victims.
In the end, Mr. Holland said, 59 percent of the ice was trucked to storage
freezers all over the country to await the next disaster; some has been used for
Hurricane Rita. Of $200 million originally set aside for ice purchases,
the bill for the Hurricane Katrina purchases so far is more than $100 million --
and climbing, Mr. Holland said.
Under the ice contract, the government pays about $12,000 to buy a 20-ton
truckload of ice, delivered to its original destination. If it is moved
farther, the price is $2.60 a mile, and a day of waiting costs up to $900, Mr.
Holland said.
Those numbers add up fast, and reports like Mr. Kostinec's have stirred concern
on Capitol Hill, as more wearying evidence of the federal government's
incoherent response to the catastrophe.
At a hearing on Wednesday, Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, expressed
astonishment that many truckloads of ice had ended up in storage 1,600 miles
from the Hurricane Katrina damage zone in her state, apparently because the
storage contractor, AmeriCold Logistics, had run out of space farther south.
"The American taxpayers, and especially the Katrina victims, cannot endure this
kind of wasteful spending," Ms. Collins said.
Asked about trips like Mr. Kostinec's, Nicol Andrews, a FEMA spokeswoman, said:
"He was put on call for a need and the need was not realized, so he went home.
Any reasonable person recognizes the fact that it makes sense to prepare for the
worst, hope for the best and place your resources where they may be needed."
Unlike an ordinary hurricane, which may leave a large population in
still-habitable housing but without power for days or weeks, Hurricane Katrina
destroyed neighborhoods and led to unprecedented evacuation, Ms. Andrews said.
"The population we ordered the ice for had been dispersed," she said, "which is
good, because they are out of harm's way."
Ms. Andrews said FEMA realized it must improve its monitoring of essential
items. The new report by the homeland security inspector general says that
after last year's hurricanes million of dollars of ice was left unused in
Florida because FEMA had "no automated way to coordinate quantities of
commodities with the people available to accept and distribute them."
Ms. Andrews said, "There are programs in the works that will help us better
track commodities, not just ice, but water and tarps and food." One system
would use bar codes and a global positioning system, "so literally we will know
exactly where every bag of ice is."
Some people, including Michael D. Brown, the former FEMA director, have
questioned why the agency spends so much money moving ice.
"I feebly attempted to get FEMA out of the business of ice," Mr. Brown told a
House panel this week. "I don't think that's a federal government
responsibility to provide ice to keep my hamburger meat in my freezer or
refrigerator fresh."
But ice, even Mr. Brown agreed, at times plays a critical role, like helping
keep patients alive at places like Meadowcrest Hospital, in Gretna, La.
After the hurricane hit, the air-conditioning went out and temperatures inside
climbed into the 90's.
"Physicians and staff attempted to cool patients by placing ice in front of
fans," Phillip Sowa, the hospital's chief executive, wrote in an online account
of the ordeal.
Archie Harris, a Wilmington, N.C., ice merchant who serves as disaster
preparedness chairman for the International Packaged Ice Association, said that
while FEMA had been criticized mostly as being underprepared, on the ice
question it was being criticized for being overprepared. "FEMA can't win
right now," Mr. Harris said. "Can you imagine what people would say if
they'd run out of ice?"
Not all of the ice delivery trips, by an estimated 4,000 drivers, ended in
frustration. Mike Snyder, a truck driver from Berwick, Pa., took an excruciating
journey that started in Allentown, Pa., on Sept. 16 and did not end until two
weeks later, on Friday morning, when he arrived in Tarkington Prairie, Tex.
The electricity was out in the small community. When Mr. Snyder pulled up
in front of a local church and unloaded his ice, residents were overjoyed to see
him. "I felt like I did a lot of good," he said.
Truck drivers who pinballed around the country felt differently.
Having almost lost his Florida home to a hurricane last year, Jeff Henderson was
eager to help when he heard that FEMA needed truckers to carry ice. He
drove at his own expense to Wisconsin to collect a 20-ton load and delivered it
to the Carthage staging area.
Then he, too, was sent across the South: Meridian, Miss.; Selma; and
finally Memphis, where he waited five days and then delivered his ice to
storage.
"I can't understand what happened," Mr. Henderson said. "The government's
the only customer that plays around like that."
Mike Hohnstein, a dispatcher in Omaha, sent a truckload out of Dubuque, Iowa, to
Meridian. From there, the driver was sent to Barksdale Air Force Base in
Louisiana, to Columbia, S.C., and finally to Cumberland, Md., where he bought a
lawn chair and waited for six days.
Finally, 10 days after he started, the driver was told to take the ice to
storage in Bettendorf, Iowa, Mr. Hohnstein said. The truck had traveled
3,282 miles, but not a cube of ice had reached a hurricane victim.
"Well," Mr. Hohnstein said, "the driver got to see the country."
His company's bill to the government will exceed $15,000, he said, but the ice
was worth less than $5,000. "It seemed like an incredible waste of money,"
he said.
The next time FEMA calls for help, it may find the response far less willing.
After two Universe Truck Lines drivers spent more than two weeks on the road to
no purpose, the company decided it had had enough. When a FEMA contractor
called and asked if the company could take some ice stored in Fremont, Neb., to
Fort Worth, Tex., Universe said no.
"Our trucks had been tied up for 17 days," Sean Smal, a Universe dispatcher,
said. "We couldn't take another trip like those."
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