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The Logistics of Emergency Management

I have spent many hours thinking about Hurricane Katrina, Disaster Relief, Aid of all kinds, and emergency management in general. After travelling to different coutnries for month-long missionary trips throughout my childhood I came to the opinion that helping people in great need had much less to do with a lack of resources than with a problem of logistics. Now that it has been two weeks since Katrina made landfall I am beginning to transfer this line of thinking to emergency management as well.

It is often said that America is the wealthiest nation in the world right now. In some ways it is, but in others it is perhaps one of the poorest. However you look at it, this country has plenty of resources and it has the means to get more and more as it needs and/or desires.

So, when we all, as a nation, had a problem of reacting helpfully to this most recent national disaster I saw it as a problem of logistics rather than a problem of resources. (Clearly, there are other issues involved as well such as desire to help, but that is for another discussion.)

In the first week of news there were many themes hitting the media. One of the themes was that rescuers were having problems getting rescuing done due to collapsed bridges, submerged roads, debris covered this and that, and most strange of all — people shooting at rescuers.

During ‘the golden 72 hours’ and after they were over (when the rescue effort slowed down) the leaders of the rescue and relief efforts tried to take on other tasks that were important to restoring the area. Engineers worked on repairing the levees, pumping water out of the city, repairing bridges, clearing debris from roads, and making more and more routes into the most damaged areas. They also started to remove bodies from the area, mark where they were found and other mortuary services. The list of these tasks is pretty long so I won’t try to list them all here.

Some of these activities happened much slower than people expected. People who are now homeless were without shelter for too long. People who had shelter, but needed to be moved out of the city waited longer than we find acceptable to be transported out of the city. Food, water, clothing, and other supplies came much too slow by many standards, and in many areas these essential things never came at all.

All of these things, in my mind, are logistical issues. It is not like our country does not have enough rescue crews, civil engineers, doctors, nurses, mortuary specialists, water and food delivery companies, or even tow truck drivers (I know that Gainesville’s residents wound’t mind seeing some of their towing companies short on drivers for a few weeks.)

Our nation doesn’t have a shortage of resources problem. Our nation has problems getting resources to where they need to be when they are needed, and making sure that they are distributed appropriately. (However approriate distribution is defined.)

Implications
I have no amazing empirical proof for this claim, but I do have a strong intution that some of this problem is simply a drawback of our society. We are fairly individualistic; we’re capatilists; we long for efficiency; we are free to do as we please; and are not forced take orders from anyone. These are some of our ideals. I am not suggesting that we change them here, but I will suggest that we recognize them, see the drawbacks that arise from them, and address those drawbacks so that our ideals can be as positive for us all as possible.

We want to be efficient. So we seek to use the least resources of time, money, and materials to accomplish any task. This is a great ideal, but it often means that we are eliminating surplus, excess, etc. We glean from every part of the plant, leaving none left for times of need. Perhaps as we continue this practice we could also make provisions for times of need, people in need, and short term emergency situations.

We are individualistic. We all operate seperately from one another. Bringing together a unified effort now takes its shape in companies, organizations, government departments, military branches, churches, clubs, families, etc. Without these units of grouped people we essentially operate alone. Knowing this we should make sure that each group exists with more purpose and readiness than what is typically stated in organizational charters or wedding vows. Some examples of what this would look like might include –

–A bottled water delivery company such as DS Waters, Nestlé Waters North America Inc., PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, or even smaller local water delivery outifts contacting customers (or arranging this at the beginning of their contracts since contacting customers uses up personnel that could otherwise be doing other work) and asking them if they can reduce or suspend service so they can use some of their resources to aid natural disaster victims. (I’d start liking Coke (headquarted in Atlana) a lot more if they had sent several trucks full of Dasani water down to the disaster areas and Pepsi hadn’t.)

–Large food companies such as Sysco, Performance Food Group (which has helped by lending portions of their MS and LA facilities to FEMA) Nash Finch, supermarkets, and even (though it may sound silly) delivery companies like Domino’s Pizza could react quickly and divert some of their supply chains to relief efforts. The whole company could then be involved in relief as they found ways to continue service to existing customers while simultaneously providing relief services to people who are in great need.

We are capatalists. This is somewhat addressed with my ideas for corporations taking the initiative to help with relief. There is a lot more that needs to be done to address this part of our National mentality in a way that allows it to remain, but appropriately handles the drawbacks that stem from being capatalists.

–BREAK–
I am losing steam on writing this, and fun-to-talk-to people are trying to talk to me. Maybe I’ll finish this up later.

Posted by David under Uncategorized |