By Staff, The Washington Post, April 3, 2008

3 Apr 2008 // R. David Paulison, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and Richard Skinner, the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general, will be testifying before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on the "new FEMA" and whether the agency is better prepared now than it was in 2005.

One thing that separates new FEMA from old FEMA?

Ice.

FEMA will not, as a rule, be sending trucks full of ice into hurricane-ravaged regions. The agency made that decision for the 2007 season, and at an event yesterday Paulison reiterated the ice-free policy looking toward the upcoming season.

"I don't know how FEMA got into the ice business, but it's not a lifesaving commodity," he told reporters at the National Hurricane Conference in Orlando. "People say they need it because they want it. They don't need it. It's not one of FEMA's key jobs."

Ice used to be essential, as a report on Hurricane Katrina by the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington highlights. The FEMA disaster relief plans assumed that at an "absolute minimum" each person would need one gallon of potable water and eight pounds of ice each day, or a total of 5.5 million pounds of ice for a day's supply.

Moving away from ice distribution will save FEMA from having to repeat a costly meltdown: Last July, the agency spent $3.4 million to melt unused ice left over from post-Katrina purchases that cost $12.5 million to store.