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Idled Truckers Take Ice North

Posted on: Tuesday, 20 September 2005, 15:01 CDT

Sep. 20--More than 100 trucks filled with leftover ice originally meant to aid Hurricane Katrina victims have left Montgomery for a storage unit in Massachusetts, the latest leg in a long waiting game for many frustrated truckers.

Officials with the Federal Emergency Management Agency said hordes of leftover ice from several staging areas would be stored in Atlanta, Arizona, Florida, and Gloucester, Mass., so that it will be ready for transport in case of another emergency.

Still, at least one trucker said the plan made little sense.

"I've hauled this ice around for 17 days for nothing," said Paul Kite, a truck driver who arrived Monday in Gloucester from Maxwell-Gunter Air Force Base, where he had been for 13 days. "Plenty of people in New Orleans, Louisiana and Mississippi needed this ice."

In all, 114 trucks left in recent days from Maxwell on a trek to Gloucester, 1,308 miles away, said Rob Holland, a spokesman for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The Corps pays about $2,700 per truck to transport the ice to Gloucester. The Corps contracted with a company to buy the ice for about 28 cents a pound or about $10,000 a truckload, almost three times the going rate, according to Jeff St. Cin, president of Gulf Ice, an ice company based in Ozark.

"I wish they would have bought some ice from me," he said.

But a Corps official said the ice was more expensive because the company had to promise delivery of more than 100 trucks within a moment's notice, which increased the cost.

"Do you know how important ice is?" said Don North, a spokesman for FEMA. "Ice allows people in a disaster area to preserve their food. Ice allows hospitals to preserve medicine. Ice allows nursing homes to hydrate senior citizens."

He said the oversupply is a result of what has become a ghost town in New Orleans, where people would be receiving the ice had they not been evacuated.

"It would be much worse for FEMA to be short of ice than to have too much," he added. "It's unfair for us to be criticized for having more ice than we pass out."

Kite said FEMA owes him $18,700 for his work and the ice. FEMA wouldn't allow him to buy the ice for $1,500, which Kite said is what it's worth.

"It's only ice. It's water, push it off on the ground. Stop paying money for it, and when the driver offers to buy it, for God's sake sell it to him," he said.

Holland said the ice would be stored in Gloucester north of Boston and be available in case of another natural disaster in the Northeast. He said the Americold Company, which contracted with FEMA to store the ice, didn't have enough room to store it at closer locations.

The ice was ordered prior to the hurricane and meant for people in areas that were affected most by the hurricane. The problem, he said, is the hurricane leveled so many areas that in many cases there was nothing to go back to, and therefore fewer people to deliver ice to.

"I know it doesn't make sense on the surface" to ship this ice to Gloucester, he said. "But what you're dealing with is: No. 1, a very dynamic situation; No. 2, they want this ice distributed all over the country, on the west coast and the east coast, because you never know where a hurricane is going to hit."

He said the Corps and FEMA would learn from this experience and work to alleviate the kinks in the future.

"There are lots of reasons to take a close look at this whole exercise and try to make some improvements," he said. "I know from past experience that that will happen. There will be a lot of 20/20 hindsight on it."

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Source: Montgomery Advertiser

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