01046161

Component

https://doi.org/10.3141/2022-09

http://scholar.google.com...rown&publication_year=2007

Extreme events pose serious logistical challenges to emergency and aid organizations active in preparation, response, and recovery operations, because the disturbances they produce have the potential to turn normal conditions suddenly into chaos. Under these conditions, delivering critical supplies (e.g., food, water, medical supplies) becomes an extremely difficult task because of the severe damage to the physical and virtual infrastructure and the limited or nonexistent transportation capacity. In this context, the recovery process is made more difficult by the prevailing lack of knowledge about the nature and challenges of emergency supply chains. As a result, the design of reliable emergency logistics systems is hampered by lack of knowledge about how formal and informal (emergent) supply chains operate and interact; methods to analyze and coordinate the flows of priority and nonpriority goods; and, in general, scientific methods to analyze logistics systems under extreme conditions. This paper describes the key logistical issues that plagued the response to Hurricane Katrina. The logistical failures following Katrina, which in August 2005 devastated the U.S. Gulf Coast, provide an example of the need to improve the efficiency of supply chains to the site of an extreme event. The paper is based on public accounts of the event and interviews conducted during a number of field visits to the Katrina-affected area in the aftermath of the event, as part of a research project funded by the National Science Foundation.

01088186

English

pp 76-82

2007

Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board

9780309104494

Print

References (16)

Disaster preparedness; Disasters and emergency operations; Emergency management; Emergency response time; Hurricanes; Improvements; Logistics; Medical equipment; Supply chain management

Hurricane Katrina, 2005

Freight Transportation; Highways; Planning and Forecasting; Safety and Human Factors; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Feb 8 2007 7:12PM

• Dynamic Network Simplex Method for Designing Emergency Evacuation Plans
• Impact of Probabilistic Road Capacity Constraints on the Spatial Distribution of Hurricane Evacuation Shelter Capacities
• Implementation of Spatiotemporal Model for Infrastructure Reconstruction Strategy Under Large-Scale Disaster
• Information Sharing During Emergency Response and Recovery: A Framework for Road Organizations
• Modeling the Hurricane Evacuation Response Curve
• Optimal Allocation of Multiple Emergency Service Resources for Protection of Critical Transportation Infrastructure
• Optimizing Protective Measures with Respect to Multiple Hazards
• Stochastic Humanitarian Inventory Control Model for Disaster Planning
• Survivability Analysis of Large-Scale Intelligent Transportation System Networks
• Testing a Flexible Geographic Information System–Based Network Flow Model for Routing Hurricane Disaster Relief Goods