WASHINGTON – Sen. Susan Collins of Maine told the acting director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency on Thursday that the agency’s policy of diverting truckloads of ice originally meant for Gulf Coast hurricane victims to locations as far away as Portland, Maine, undermines the public’s confidence in FEMA.

The federal agency purchased nearly 200 million pounds of ice for more than $100 million, Collins said, and most of that ice traveled thousands of miles on “circuitous routes” throughout the country but was never delivered to the victims.

“It erodes public confidence in the federal government’s management, and I also think it erodes public support for additional appropriations to help the victims when the public sees this kind of waste in their own backyard,” Collins said during the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing she chaired. The committee has been investigating FEMA’s preparedness and response to Hurricane Katrina.

“We don’t have a good tracking system of where the commodities go,” and that needs to be addressed, the acting director, R. David Paulison, told Collins.

In late September, FEMA diverted hundreds of trucks loaded with bagged ice to Portland and other sites around the country after realizing the ice was no longer needed to assist the rescue efforts in Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi but might be needed in the future, according to the Associated Press.

Collins noted that in a response to an earlier letter from her inquiring about the ice situation, FEMA officials told her 30 trucks had been diverted to Maine. But Collins said she visited Portland and saw many more trucks than that lined up and running to keep the refrigeration units operating and prevent the ice from melting. FEMA amended the figure to 250 trucks just before the hearing, she said.

One hundred of the refrigerator trucks have since been dispatched from Portland to assist victims of Hurricane Rita, and the ice in the other 150 or so trucks has been moved into a refrigerated storage facility in Portland, Collins said.

“Clearly the system by which commodities are ordered, tracked and delivered is deeply flawed,” Collins said.

“It’s not such a bad idea to talk to Wal-Mart,” Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., advised Paulison, because the huge retail chain tracks a large amount of commodities all over the country on a regular basis.

Paulison, who before coming to the Department of Homeland Security in 2003 was the chief of the Miami-Dade Fire Rescue Department in Florida, said FEMA was not going to get rid of the ice until the end of this hurricane season because it might be needed again.