ResilienceWays to Strengthen the Resilience of Supply Chains After Hurricanes

A new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine recommends ways to make supply chains — the systems that provide populations with critical goods and services, such as food and water, gasoline, and pharmaceuticals and medical supplies – more resilient in the face of hurricanes and other disasters, drawing upon lessons learned from the 2017 hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria.

Requested by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the report urges FEMA and other organizations to focus more on restoring regular supply chains as soon as possible after a hurricane, and less on the traditional approach of using parallel emergency relief supply chains for an extended period of time.  Other critical strategies are to strengthen emergency managers’ understanding of local supply chain dynamics, improve information-sharing and coordination among public and private stakeholders, and provide training to emergency managers on supply-chain dynamics and best practices.

“In 2017 Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria revealed some significant vulnerabilities in national and regional supply chains,” said James Featherstone, chair of the committee that wrote the report, and executive director of the Los Angeles Homeland Security Advisory Council.  “Lessons learned from these hurricanes can inform future strategies to improve supply chain management.”

NAS says that for the study, the committee held meetings in four locations affected by the 2017 storms – Houston; Miami; San Juan, Puerto Rico; and St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands. In each location they heard from federal, state, and local public officials and managers, private sector stakeholders, and others involved in maintaining the functionality of supply chains before, during, and after the storms. This input, together with engagement with additional experts and a case study analysis performed by the CNA Institute for Public Research, informed the committee’s deliberations.

Although the contexts and experiences of the storm-affected areas were diverse, some common dynamics unfolded, the report says. For example, in most places, emergency managers’ understanding of post-storm bottlenecks in supply chains was constrained by limited pre-storm assessment of vulnerable and critical parts of supply chains, together with information disruptions resulting from power and communication loss. And a common source of bottlenecks in supply chains was unsolicited donations sent to affected areas, which drew critical resources away from more strategically targeted needs.