A whole bunch of truckers who drove truckloads of ice to the Gulf Coast region to aid victims of Hurricane Katrina sat around for a few days before being directed by FEMA to drive close to 180 million (that’s 180,000,000) pounds of ice 1,300 miles to Portland, Maine while the agency tries to figure out what to do with it. Apparently, according to this report, more trucks are headed to other, seemingly random U.S. cities. One taxpaying trucker isn’t exactly thrilled:

One man waiting to unload his rig at a warehouse in Maine says sending the ice 13-hundred miles from Alabama is a “bad use of taxpayers’ money.” He says the same kinds of things happened after Hurricane Andrew in 1992. Truckloads of water were simply dumped.

FEMA says it doesn’t waste supplies and surpluses are saved for future disasters.

I imagine they’re stockpiling competence, effectiveness, know-how, honesty, caring and a clue to roll out in a future disaster, too. Look, there’s a Category 4-5 huricane Iikely to hit Texas later this week. If FEMA wanted to have that ice further away from Hurricane Rita’s likely Texas landfall, they really couldn’t have done better in the lower 48 than send it to Maine.

Andrew Sullivan, who’s on the story — and also penning something at the Washington Post that the paper contends is a blog — has a rightfully snarky Mainer’s response to the ice windfall. Proving that when FEMA hands you Katrina Aid, add some lemons and make Katrina-ade.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 21st, 2005 at 8:42 am by Baylen Linnekin and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.