Tainted Food Used After Fire

Thousands of tons of contaminated food were released to the public last year from a burned-out storage cave in Kansas City owned by an Oregon company after insurance companies and salvagers pressured federal regulators, the Kansas City Star reported yesterday.

During a six-month investigation, the newspaper tracked the food contaminated in a fire at Portland-based Americold, the world's largest underground cold storage cave, which began Dec. 28, 1991.

It flared and smoldered for four months, sending smoke through miles of passageways and vaults.

Americold Services Corp. owns the 100-acre warehouse, one of a dozen underground storage complexes carved from limestone formations unique to the Kansas City area.

Soot and residue spread by the fire contained chemicals known to cause cancer, genetic mutations and other health problems. The chemicals make food unfit to eat and illegal to sell, according to federal law.

Some contaminated food went to religious farming communes in South Dakota and Canada. More of it went to feed babies in inner-city Detroit, federal food programs in Arizona, and to the Far East.

There have been no complaints of illnesses from the food, but regulators said they can't guarantee the contaminants won't hurt anyone eventually.

More than 100 companies stored food in Americold's complex, whose stock included tons of meat, produce and dry goods.

Flames and heat destroyed tons of the food stored in a 10-acre area of the warehouse. But toxic smoke and soot permeated almost every inch of the remaining 90 acres. The insurers hired salvagers to try to recover losses by selling the damaged goods.

Insurers and salvagers started an aggressive lobbying effort to get regulators to loosen controls, and some threatened to sue, the Star reported.