This is just another indicator of our boom-and-bust funding of public health and disaster preparedness. People and organizations do the right thing after a disaster, but they cannot sustain the effort over time, or there are "design flaws" as noted in the linked story above that point out the lack of a plan and funding to rotate the supplies to keep them from expiring.
Back when I was the King County director of emergency management, for 11 years, we would get calls about civil defense supplies, rotting someplace, most likely in a basement (late 1990s). Besides having to dispose of the expired supplies, we made sure the morphine that was part of the supply cache was properly disposed of. The hard candy was often placed out in bowls for emergency management training classes.
Then we tried our own effort in coordination with the American Red Cross. Shipping containers were purchased and stocked with supplies from the Red Cross. We even put ventilation into the containers to help move the air. These containers were then placed on school property around King County. School children participated by doing some murals that decorated the containers. Elizabeth Dole, when she was president of the American Red Cross, came out and we held a media event.
Alas, after a few years, the supplies ended up getting wet, moldy and totally unusable. It would have been better to have the supplies stored inside at a school, but that type of space did/does not exist. Good intentions, good execution, poor results. Maybe in Arizona the results would have been better.
