Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria: Findings on Supply Chain Resilience (Webinar)

This CNA analysis has had a profound impact on thinking in emergency management about the role of private sector supply chains in disaster response and the role government can play in supporting the resilience of private sector supply chains.

At the request of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, CNA experts in emergency management studied how private sector supply chains of food, waters, fuel, and medical supplies reacted in the aftermath of three 2017 hurricanes: Harvey, Irma, and Maria. These findings have been presented to the National Academies and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA. This webinar by Phil Palin summarizes the findings of a CNA report: Supply Chain Resilience and 2017 Hurricane Season, available at https://www.cna.org/reports/2018/01/supply-chain-resilience-and-the-2017-hurricane-season .

A short YouTube video that summarizes these findings is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s75qhMiS_IY

More information on CNA's work on supply chain resilience is available at
https://www.cna.org/centers-and-divisions/ipr/emo/supply-chain-resilience

Palin concludes that the importance of recognizing hourglass structures and potential bottlenecks in supply chains ahead of time and taking steps to address them ahead of time is the fundamental notion coming out of the 2017 hurricane season. We observed demand and supply networks behaving with significant, surprising resilience, especially in Puerto Rico. Hurricane Maria was very bad, and still the fuel, food, and even the water supply chains came back with amazing speed and volume. We found that government in general and emergency management does not have an effective means for monitoring the resilience or the non-resilience of these demand and supply networks. Everyone was blind, but it was especially difficult that the public sector was blind. Because the status of the pre-existing demand and supply networks were mostly unknown, public sector assumed the worst. It was a very reasonable assumption, since they could not observe what was happening, but then they took action that actually suppressed the supply chains that were most important to support survivors. There are sources and methods available that would provide everyone in the network greater awareness regarding the status of demand and supply networks, and this would allow emergency management and others to support the resilience of supply chains and to target the gaps, filling assets that only the public sector can bring to bear. That targeting is so important because there are only limited resources available to emergency management, so applying those resources where they're most needed is critically important. Emergency management in Puerto Rico, Florida, and Texas did things in the 2017 hurricane season that were successful in increasing the resilience of critical supply chains, but those were done usually on an ad hoc basis by smart operators responding to the crisis in real time. We're suggesting government be much more effective to recognize that this is a core mission, facilitating the recovery, and sometimes the redirection of private sector supply chains is the way that dense populations are served after a potentially catastrophic event. It's the way that you avoid a catastrophe when the grid and telecoms are down for the long term.

https://www.cna.org

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