Washington – Federal officials ordered but never managed to coordinate the delivery of more than $100 million worth of ice in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina – ice intended to cool food, medicine and sweltering victims of the storm.
Partly because of the mass evacuation forced by the hurricane, and partly because of what a government report last 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.
In the week following the storm, the Federal Emergency Management Agency 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, 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, 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.
Truck driver Mark Kostinec was among those making the long odyssey with a chilly cargo. Kostinec 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 FEMA staging area.
Kostinec, 40, a driver for Universe Truck Lines of Omaha, Neb., 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, Kostinec sat for a 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 three of about 150 ice trucks were sent to North Carolina, he said. So on Sept. 17, Kostinec headed to Fremont, Neb., where he unloaded his ice into a government-rented storage freezer.
“I dragged that ice around for 4,100 miles, and it never got used,” 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. But he was perplexed 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, Kostinec’s government-ordered meandering was not unusual.
Under the ice contract, the government pays about $12,000 for a 20-ton truckload of ice, delivered to its intended destination. If it’s moved farther, the price is $2.60 a mile, and a day of waiting costs up to $900, Holland said.
Those numbers add up fast, and reports like Kostinec’s have stirred concern on Capitol Hill, as more wearying evidence of the federal government’s incoherent response to the catastrophe.
Of $200 million set aside for ice purchases, the bill for the Hurricane Katrina purchases so far is more than $100 million – and climbing, Holland said.
At a hearing last week, Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, expressed astonishment that many truckloads of ice had ended up in storage in her state, 1,600 miles from the hurricane damage zone, 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,” Collins said.
Asked about trips such as 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, 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.”
Andrews said FEMA realized it must improve its monitoring of essential items.
A 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.”
Andrews said, “There are programs in the works that will help us better track commodities.”
One system would use bar codes and a global positioning system, “so literally we will know exactly where every bag of ice is,” she 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, Texas, Universe said no.