To: Sully- who wrote (62684 ) 10/1/2005 3:07:43 PM From: abstract Read Replies (1) | Respond to Your gov't at work:Ninety-one thousand tons of ice cubes, intended to cool food, medicine and sweltering victims of the [Hurricane Katrina] storm. It would cost taxpayers more than $100 million, and most of it would never be delivered. Pick up 20 tons of ice in Greenville, Pa., and take it to Carthage, Mo., a staging area for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.at Carthage, instead of unloading, he was told to take his 2,000 bags of ice on to Montgomery, Ala. 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. nytimes.com
