Summary: Every year, millions of pounds of food are damaged or contaminated as a result of mishandling, accidents, or disasters, such as floods or fires. Such a disaster occurred in December 1991, when an underground fire potentially contaminated about 245 million pounds of food in the Americold storage cave in Kansas City, Kansas. More than half of the food was sent to landfills to be destroyed. The Kansas Department of Health and the Environment found the remainder--about 102 million pounds of food--to be salvageable, and it was released to the public. Of this total, about 3.7 million pounds were shipped to a Minnesota food salvager on the basis of laboratory tests done by a consultant to one of the food owners. It was later learned that this consultant had been under investigation for submitting false testing data to the Food and Drug Administration. In addition to describing the events surrounding the Americold fire, this report discusses lessons learned from the incident that could be used to improve federal and state regulation of food salvaging.
