Rusted Sky

One of the things about being in the military for any length of time is you become aware of just how very important the supply system is. It provides your food, your clothing, ammo, tanks, spare parts, medicine to the hospitals - EVERYTHING goes through Supply. (Please note I'm simplifying for clarity here. Figure if the military needs it, Supply gets it. In the civilian world, retail serves the same function.)

Hand in hand with Supply comes Logistics. A simple definition of Logistics is "getting what you need, where you need it, when you need it, in a condition you can use it". (On the civilian side, you've got FedEx, UPS, DHL, the post office, and a heck of a lot of warehousing and shipping companies - all of which get stuff from the seller to the buyer on every level.)

And it all works pretty darn well. You can get what you need, when you need it. Logistics rules! Um, except when you actually can't get the stuff where it's needed, when it's needed.

What you see in New Orleans is a logistics nightmare. The major methods of transportation were unavailable. Roads? Washed out or flooded. Rail? Same. Air? Airports flooded - no way to land. Helicopters? Can't carry much. Ships? Docks nowhere near where the supplies were needed, and local transportation was unavailable. You literally can't get the stuff there in the quantities needed.

Folks, imagine you're the logistics manager on a disaster response team. You've just been alerted to be ready to respond to a disaster like New Orleans - where basically everything around the city was scrubbed away. Here are some of the questions you'll be asking yourself.

1. How much is going to be needed, and what?

2. Where are the supplies to be used currently warehoused?

3. Where are the supplies going to be needed most?

4. How are you going to get the supplies where they're needed?

5. Where are the disaster response people (most of whom have Real Lives until a disaster hits) going to be coming from, and how long will it take them to get there, organize, and establish a staging area to receive the supplies for initial stockpiling?

6. What transportation systems are operational into the affected area, and how much can they carry per day? (You don't know the conditions yet - you've yet to find out just how screwed you are.)

7. Where are there facilities to store and distribute the supplies INSIDE the disaster area, and how close are they to the areas of greatest need?

8. Do you have vehicles to transport the supplies into the affected area?

9. Are airports in the area operational? Is airlift feasible? (A standard Air Force C-130 can haul about as much as a railway box car - call it 20 tons. But if you don't have anyplace to land it, or airdrop the supplies, you're kind of out of luck. You can get the stuff there fast, but it won't do you much good.)

10. Are the highways passible? How long will it take to clear the highways into the disaster area?

11. Are railways passible? Are there unloading areas that would be suitable and feasible?

(Note - ships are right out. They can transport a heck of a lot at one time, but it takes too long to get the supplies loaded, and if there's no place to unload and distribute stuff from the ships then all you've got is a floating warehouse that might as well be on the other side of the world.)

Then you start your planning - aware that whatever you plan may have to change in moments if conditions change. The questions I've got above are just off the top of my head - figure there's a good fifty or more OTHER problems they had to solve for each question above. And they ALL have to be solved before the first truckload gets to it's destination.

Now, New Orleans is an example of everything going wrong. It'll be a screaming nightmare for logistics planners for decades. You've got a mayor that didn't issue an evac order until prodded hard, who basically didn't follow his own disaster prep plans, a city that had the routes into it destroyed along with a lot of the surrounding area, and was flooded to boot - and it took ONLY four days to get organized, get the supplies procured, delivered and staged, get vehicles and get the roads opened and get large quantities of aid in.

Four days - to move a mountain. There were some damn sharp people working their asses off to make that happen.

It's easy to bitch about how bad and slow the response was. If you aren't familiar with what the logistic response entailed, you can go "If Domino's can get me a pizza in a half hour, why couldn't FEMA get stuff to NO faster?" If you think you could have done better, I strongly urge you to get a degree in logistics management and go to work for FEMA. If you can figure out a way to cut the response time to a worst-case scenario ... something like NO ... by even 10%, you'd be a hero. Unsung, unnoticed except by a handful of your peers, but a hero still.

J.