Somebody's hoarding

In a personal e-mail, someone reports hearing from relatives in Beaumont and Port Arthur that store shelves are stripped of baking soda. It's simply in extremely short supply. People are using it to scrub and deodorize refrigerators and freezers that they hope to salvage. The stink and goo remaining when stored food got too hot for too many days after electricity failed are almost beyond imagining. Thousands of refrigerators must be on their way to landfills, and that will create all sorts of processing and disposal bottlenecks and problems. In fact, the Beaumont Enterprise has done some reporting on the subject of fridges [10/15: the story's down]. The Enterprise has reported throughout on a part of the storm-affected region that hasn't been much heard from.