From: "Mark" 

I read that ice story at least a week ago, somewhere, obviously not in the Times...

That's an example of very old news finally getting to the Grey (or is ashen
more appropriate by now?) Lady, but it's getting increasingly deja vu'ish
out there in general. Often, when scanning the headlines on the morning
papers, I say to myself, why are they putting that on the front page? It
may have been that I read it only the day before, but it still seems old by
morning 

"Rich Gauszka"  wrote in message
news:433f3b7f{at}w3.nls.net...
>A 100 million dollar + blunder that Gary B can't blame on the mayor of New
>Orleans 
>
> "I feebly attempted to get FEMA out of the business of ice," Mr. Brown
> told a House panel this week
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/02/national/nationalspecial/02ice.html
>
> 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."
>
> .......
>
> 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."
>
> .......
>
> 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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