Did I miss an episode where they explained how government entities are a. efficient b. a good thing? It’s not so different from reality. It is a hulking menace: a big, totally incompetent one, though perhaps a bit less opportunistic and duplicitous than the movie implied.
Good question. What DID they need all that much ice for anyway? I can’t think of any pressing reason to send 800 tons of ice as a primary element of a disaster relief effort.
As a secondary reason, though, I would expect tanker-truck convoys of tequila, triple sec, and lime juice; plus the world’s largest blender.
To preserve the bodies of victims?
Regardless how incompetent, I’d have a hard time believing that any organization would have sent truckloads of ice for no reason at all. So, there must be a reason, probably non obvious, possibly mistaken, but a reason nevertheless.
Allow me to clarify. My comment about ice for drinks was not meant as ‘They didn’t need ice in New Orleans’.
What I meant is this: There was a need for a large amount of ice in New Orleans. Preserving bodies is a decent guess. Maybe some medicines needed to be cooled PDQ. Or to counteract heat exhaustion. Whatever. Large quantities of ice are (or were in the past) used when there is no refrigeration. So why would FEMA expect to find refrigeration to keep the ice, when the ice is needed because there was no refrigeration? So I ‘surmised’ 
that since using the ice as refrigeration, they must have thought it was for some other purpose – like icing drinks.
FEMA 2005 was incompetent. My favorite story about them (I live in S. Louisiana)
is that the local police chief quickly figured out how to deal with them. FEMA reps, once they arrived, quickly gained a reputation for hijacking fuel trucks, for official business one presumes. The police needed fuel for their vehicles. So the local police chief called a friend up in N. Louisiana and asked for a fuel shipment-but take the placards off the tankers first. Problem solved. The FEMA people didn’t recognize the tankers and the fuel got where it was needed. After Katrina the universal view was the the Coast Guard was here along with the storm rescuing people and providing real help. FEMA showed up a couple of weeks later to help pick up the trash.
That said, they are from what I have heard, a transformed agency. Only a major disaster will prove it, but I am told they are much much better and more capable than 3 (is it only 3??) years ago.
The main reason to have ice in such a disaster is to preserve food stuffs and medicines; to provide cold beverages (water, other non-alcoholic drinks); and to provide ways to create cold compresses for folks with heat-related problems. I’ve been through four significant hurricanes, and ice was a very valuable commodity each time. And while there were a few thousand fatalities down here, the ice that arrived was too precious to waste on the dead.
The major miscalculation about bringing ice to New Orleans was thinking that the trucks could get the ice to the victims. There was only one way to get such relief into the city (and, by extension, to those who needed it) by truck, and the state director of Homeland Security determined that it was too risky to send in the aid. Accordingly, the trucks were turned away.
FEMA (Fix Everything? My Ass!) is a four letter acronym down here, but the state and city governments also get their fair share of criticism.