Or, FEMA no longer supplies ice except in cases of "medical emergency" which is not defined.
It would be relatively easy for someone who doesn't live in a place like Houston and doesn't take cold-chain-mandatory medications and isn't heat sensitive to think that no ice is not that big a deal. However, it's worth remembering that in heat waves of the past, a lot of people died every summer from the heat all around the country. A/C changed that, so dramatically that now a lot of people live in places where they would die without it. So the ice thing has gotten more necessary, not less.
But even before A/C, even in the days of tenements, cold water (if that) flats, and 8-people-per-room in immigrant neighborhoods, Visiting Nurse Associations provided a very short list of things to help with medical problems and emergencies and high on that list (remember, _before refrigeration_, in many cases, so this ice was chipped out of a lake somewhere and shipped in sawdust) was ice.
The idea that the emergency assistance of last resort is just opting out of providing ice is breathtakingly irresponsible.
_This_ is the new and improved FEMA?
Live in fear. After all, that's how this administration got elected, got re-elected, and has generally evaded prosecution thus far. They want you to be afraid. They'll come up with new things for you to be afraid of. This one might not look that scary, but it really and truly is. These are people who care so little about the health of the people who are in their hands, that they will literally not supply the basics of health care as it was understood (correctly, in this case, and even more urgently today, since so much of modern medicine is pharmaceutical, and a lot of that requires a cold-chain) over a century ago.
http://www.abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=5828158&page=1