View the July 18, 2018 seminar recording
Jennifer Symoun
Good afternoon or good morning to those of you to the West. Welcome to the Talking Freight Seminar Series. My name is Jennifer Symoun and I will moderate today's seminar. Today's topic is Logistics of Large-Scale Incident Event Response and Business Continuity.
Before I go any further, I do want to let those of you who are calling into the teleconference for the audio know that you need to mute your computer speakers or else you will be hearing your audio over the computer as well.
Today's seminar will last 90 minutes, with 60 minutes allocated for the speakers, and the final 30 minutes for audience Question and Answer. If during the presentations you think of a question, you can type it into the chat area. Please make sure you send your question to "Everyone" and indicate which presenter your question is for. Presenters will be unable to answer your questions during their presentations, but I will start off the question and answer session with the questions typed into the chat box. We will also take questions over the phone if time allows and I will provide instructions on how to do so once we get to that point.
The PowerPoint presentations used during the seminar are available for download from the file download box in the lower right corner of your screen. The presentations will also be available online within the next few weeks, along with a recording and a transcript. I will notify all attendees once these materials are posted online.
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Finally, I encourage everyone to please also download the evaluation form from the file share box and submit this form to me after you have filled it out.
Today we'll have three presentations given by:
Our first presentation will be given by Jose Holguin-Veras, the William H. Hart Professor and Director of the VREF Center of Excellence for Sustainable Urban Freight Systems at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2013 White House's Transportation Champion of Change Award, and the 1996 Milton Pikarsky Memorial Award. His research interests are in freight transportation, and disaster response logistics. His work on disaster response has played an influential role in disaster response procedures, and has led to deeper insight into how best to respond to large disasters and catastrophic events. He is in numerous leadership positions at professional organizations, public sector agencies, and leading journals.
Jose Holguin-Veras
Fantastic! It gives me a great pleasure to tell you all a little bit about our research on disaster response. I want to start with an apology of sorts. It happens that many of the topics that we will discuss might run the risk of offending people. This is a very delicate subject. I apologize in advance to anybody who might be offended or hurt by my comments.
Basically, what we do at Rensselaer is try to avert collapses in the humanitarian response like what happened in Haiti. As you can see in these pictures that I took ten days after the disaster in Haiti, there was a complete collapse of the humanitarian response system. Our goal is to try to prevent that from happening. We do that by means of field work. We have been conducting field work in disaster for basically, almost 20 years. We have studied in detail dozens of disasters. The vast majority of the catastrophic events that have taken place in the world. Our intent is to characterize what happened, to do diagnosis to identify lessons that should be learned, and use those insights to define policy procedures that could help disaster response agencies do better. All of this has been funded by National Science Foundation pretty much on a continuous basis.
What I want to do now is to try to very, very briefly, because of the time constraints, to tell you a bit about the top lessons that we have learned after all of those many years of field work. In essence, this is what I call the top 10. I cannot discuss all of them in detail because of the time constraint. I am going to focus on those that are highlighted in bold in the slides. Since Kathy Fulton is going to talk about private sector integration and their role in the response, I will not discuss the subject. Kathy is more than qualified to speak about private sector integration and will do a much better job than I could.
The first thing is that we need to understand that disaster response is not only a technical challenge. It is something more than that. Disaster response is a socio-technical endeavor. In a way, a social network of people orchestrate a response and they conduct a series of technical tasks. The implication of that, it is not only the bridges, the trucks, the ports that have to be able withstand the effects of the disaster, but also the people and the social networks that makes things happen. In logistics for instance, you have shippers, receivers, carriers, drivers, etcetera, etcetera if those individuals cannot connect with each other the whole thing collapses. This socio-technical perspective is the only way to understand why things happen in the complex realities of disaster.
Case in point, the truck crisis after Hurricane Maria. You all have seen the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, a truck crisis was reported. I am going show you how this socio-technical perspective explains what happened. In reality, the slide you have here is not from Puerto Rico, the slide you have here is from Haiti because the truck crisis that materialized after Maria already happened in Haiti. What is the issue there?
Essentially, let me start with Haiti. In Haiti, when the foreign groups arrived to help they simply could not find enough trucks, and they resorted to bring trucks from the Dominican Republic. As you can see here, at the bottom of the slide, in reality the truck crisis was the symptom of the lack of connectivity between the external aid and the local logistical system. In Puerto Rico, exactly the same happened, exactly the same. Again at the height of response, basically they could not find enough trucks, and they basically in desperation, people brought trucks and drivers to Puerto Rico. In reality there were enough trucks in Puerto Rico the problem was that there was a crisis of connectivity. The external aid that arrive to Puerto Rico, could not find a way to connect with local truckers. This is basically one of the key insights.
Another important lesson that we need to take into account is that there is a major difference between a disaster and a catastrophe. A catastrophe is not only like a big disaster, the catastrophe is something qualitatively different. I need to stress that I am talking here from a sociological perspective. I am not talking about from the personal or the family point of view, in which the death of a family member could be a catastrophe for a family. I am talking about disaster and catastrophe from the social point of view. In fact, this is such a complex topic there are books written with the title, "What is a Disaster" in which social scientists discuss the alternative way to define it. Instead of dwelling into the fine points of disaster science theory, I am going to show four pictures, four satellite pictures that exemplify the key differences between disasters and catastrophes. The first one is basically the typical definition of disasters and catastrophes. I want to stress the elements here highlighted in this red box. One of the things that happens in catastrophes is that the local leadership is completely wiped out and unable to perform their typical duties.
Pictures of disasters, let me show you. This is Joplin. This is Joplin before and this is Joplin after. As you can see here, this is the path that the tornado took. You could also see that the rest of the city is intact, and they could bring medical teams, nurses, construction equipment etcetera, etcetera, they bring all that to there in order to help people.
As an example of a catastrophic event, the city-town of Minami Sanriku that was impacted by the tsunami of 2011. This is Minami Sanriku before and this is Minami Sanriku after. As you can see, total devastation. The capacity of locals to respond has been wiped out. There are also other complications. The number entry points into the saturation area are small, the area tends to be large, etcetera, etcetera. These things translate into a super challenging response.
Another important distinction between disasters and catastrophes is the difficulty of doing the local distribution. In essence, just to give you some numerical estimate of this, these are basically the number of staff hours that we estimated for the case of Haiti. What you see here, is that for every semi-trailer that was brought from Santo Domingo to Port-au-Prince that required about 22 staff hours. Distributing the cargo; transferring that cargo to small trucks to navigating the impacted area, increases the amount of resources required by a factor of 12. And moving that to the point of distribution is like 60 times the staff-hours that were needed. In essence, the local distribution requires, in large events, tens of thousands of people, and that is a tremendous challenge.
My next question is who could provide that kind of manpower? Just to give you a sense, with the assistance of optimization models that we have developed, we estimate that the number of volunteers needed to respond to Haiti was about 40,000 people, which is basically two divisions of average size of the US Army. This is basically the amount of manpower that was needed. Who could provide that? Probably some of you remember what happened in Haiti, there was a complete collapse and the US Army had to use helicopters to drop supplies. Why did that happen? Well it happens because the aid that arrived to Port-au-Prince, could not find effective channels to the local logistical capacity. In desperation, some of the groups tried to do the local distributions themselves. Leading to a pattern like this, or they were able to ally themselves with some small groups. At the end there were groups like this, massively connected networks that were the only ones that did a decent job of distributing supplies. In essence, operations like this are bound to fail because they cannot typically muster the amount of staff resources, volunteers, needed to serve the needs of a group of people.
Just to give you some pictures about the implications of this. This is basically what happens when the U.N. opened 12 ports in Port-au-Prince, a city with 2 million people. Basically, we need the distribution list and have to have in the case of Haiti, I mean 100's of points of distribution. In contrast, the collaborative aid networks, this is basically one that have been meeting, were able to deliver supplies quite efficiently in smaller quantities.
In reality, different collectives of people participate in disaster response. First we have what we call established groups that basically conduct the fire department doing search and rescue, we have basically a great assortment of people. In essence, the reality is that basically the established groups, the Red Cross, the Red Crescent, etcetera, etcetera, they typically have supplies but they typically lack the capillary vessels to deliver the supplies to the impacted area. In the list that we call the non-established group, they have the logistical capillarity to deliver the supplies, but they typically lack the supplies. The question is how do we merge these two sides? In Puerto Rico we found a tremendous amount of activity and innovation. This is basically some of the most prominent ones. There was a tremendous amount of innovation and creativity. This non-establishment group, did in our opinion a fantastic job.
Now the fundamental insight of this, is that in order to deliver efficiently critical supplies after disasters, in essence, we need to rely on the local social network. Because it is impossible for the outside help to come up with the tens of thousands of volunteers that are needed as quickly as they are needed. In essence, basically, we need to do something else. That would present a major conundrum, which is the following. In reality in catastrophic events, the local capacity has been significantly compromised. Thus, if the local officials and local leaders simply cannot fulfill their mission, we have a problem. The reason is that most disaster response plans assume that locals will take care of themselves for the first 48 hours; and that federal aid will be received within 3 days. The practice is for the federal government to provide supplies to a state and local governments, that in turn are supposed to undertake the local distribution. However, in cases like this, in cases of catastrophic events, the locals cannot be expected to be able to undertake the local distribution because, by virtue of the catastrophic nature of the event, the local capacity to do so has been compromised. That happened in Puerto Rico in the same way that it happened in Hurricane Katrina, and in Haiti. In essence this is the conundrum we have to address.
How big is the challenge? Well, in essence, by far, in typical disasters the typical challenge is the delivery of relief supplies to the impacted area. Now in catastrophic events, the toughest challenge is not to deliver supplies to the area, the toughest challenge is to distribute the supplies among the population in need. An idea of that is basically to put in place a network of point of distribution, in essences, we need to have the right size of ports and also number of ports are needed where they are needed. And that is not a trivial issue. Just to give you an idea take a picture from Haiti that shows what happens when the number of ports, in this case was too small.
In the case of Puerto Rico we estimated using optimization models, we estimated under 2 different assumptions of the need: how many people are needed and how many trucks. And the numbers are here. Just to give you a sense, this number of about 20,000 people, that represents the average size of a U.S. Army division, that I was told takes that about three weeks to deploy. In essence, in the fact that we have no time. Basically, we need to gather these massive volunteers locally. And that requires, basically taking advantage of this local social network.
How should we respond to catastrophic events? Well, in catastrophic events, the paradigm that we traditionally use, that the federal government transfers the cargo to the state and local governments, doesn't work. In essence, if the local capacity has been compromised they cannot be expected to take care of the local distribution. That is the fundamental insight. In essence, the outside has to basically come in force to try to reestablish at least the backbone on the local distribution network. In parallel it is important somehow do extensive outreach to local communities, local social networks, that could be religious networks, an association of evangelical or catholic churches, private sector and the trucking industry. In essence, all those things have to be done in parallel.
With that I want to stop here for the sake of time. I want to acknowledge that this research that we are presenting here was funded by the National Science Foundation, some of our team members, and some references. And with that, I want to thank you for your attention.
Jennifer Symoun
Thank you Jose. Our next presentation will be given by Kathy Fulton, the Executive Director for American Logistics Aid Network (ALAN). She leads the organization in facilitating donations of logistics services and equipment. ALAN's has responded to all major disasters in the past 10 years, enabling efficient delivery of millions of dollars of humanitarian aid. Ms. Fulton's passion is the intersection of supply chain and emergency management, focusing on the critical role logistics and supply chain professionals play in disaster relief. Before I move on, I want to remind everyone if you have questions please type them into the chat box. We will get to them after the presentation. Kathy you can go ahead.
Kathy Fulton
Thank you so much Jennifer and good afternoon everyone. So I always love listening to Doctor Holguin-Veras speak because His research greatly informs the activities that our organization undertakes on the ground. So we do rely heavily on his work to inform our actions. You will see that my presentation will not be quite as structured as his, or less research focused. Probably when we get to Persia Payne-Hurley's presentation I am not quite as structured, our organization is not quite as mature as hers. We are kind of right in the middle between government, nonprofit and businesses. Helping to support disaster relief activities from a logistics perspective. So I am going to talk about who our organization is and how we participate. We will talk about some of the business considerations. The considerations that businesses have as they need to move freight after disasters or catastrophic events, really focused on the owners and operators of commercial supply chains. We are going talk about some of the things that we saw businesses experience in 2017, and some of the ways that they were able to leverage and work through their problems and give back using their logistics skills. I am then going to touch a little bit on post 2017 and the hurricanes and wildfires and what that means for private sector freight in relationship to some of the after action activities that we have heard that FEMA is undertaking, and the way businesses are evolving their models. Then I will close out. We love to close with a good news story. So I will share one of those with you as well.
To understand who our organization is, think back to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. As that storm rolled through the Gulf Coast we saw a lot of challenges with supply chains. We were, as a nation struggling to get supplies to the disaster survivors that had evacuated to the Superdome or to even get them out of harm's way. We were formed shortly after that event to kind of look at how businesses can use their experience and their expertise to support disaster relief activities. When you look at logistics and the humanitarian logistics spending for humanitarian response, about 80 percent of that goes towards logistics. We've been told by certain nonprofit executives that up to 40 percent of that is waste. I'm not talking about malicious or intentional ways people are lining their pockets. I'm talking about the lack of coordination that can occur and all of the other challenges that go into humanitarian response. We will discuss some of those coordination challenges. The collaborative aid networks that Jose spoke about, we want to be that for the logistics community And the supply chain service provider community. We have been serving that role since right after Hurricane Katrina. We do that for anything logistics. Not just transportation, but material handling equipment, and warehouse space, and even logistics and supply chain knowledge. We are, as I mentioned right in the middle of it all between government, business, and nonprofit. It is a lot of fun getting to do what it is that we do.
I mentioned we were formed by the industry. We partner with 30+ associations. You will see some of them represented here. Some of the groups I don't have on here that I think are probably participating on the call today would be some of the state trucking associations and the state emergency operations emergency management groups. Persia is representing North Carolina's Emergency Management Group. We work alongside these associations because they have their members who have the expertise. They have the assets and they have the resources to support humanitarian activities following disasters. These associations have those trusted relationships. They know who is doing the work. But on the flip side of that they also know who may need help. Which of their members may need help. That's important to us because we want to make sure businesses are staying in business. The more businesses that are open and operating in those pre-existing supply chains, are online post-disaster, the less need we have for this point of distribution that Doctor Holguin-Veras talked about. That reduces the friction and the need for pushing expensive government supplies in.
Some of the folks that we support are on the nonprofit side. These are folks who represent any type of humanitarian response you can think of. Whether it's feeding people or sheltering pets or emotional/spiritual care. You name it. There is a nonprofit disaster relief organization out there for every mission that you can think of. But most of them are not staffed to have logisticians on staff. So we help them work with the business community, find the resources, find the expertise that they need and supplement their activities in a crisis scenario.
When you look at all of that together, we like to tell people that our work is really about juggling a bunch of greasy cats. The reason for that is that there are different interests and motivations that each of the sectors brings. Government has the goal of protecting life, safety, and nonprofits want to serve their communities, and businesses want to make money. All of those are noble and much-needed goals. But can there be an alignment of them? We have to say yes, when things are coordinated and there is a way to match the needs with the desire to help, and the things can be coordinated and facilitated and convened. That's who we are as an organization. We want to be that collaborative network. I will talk a little bit about some of the things we were seeing and we were hearing from the business community in 2017 during Harvey, Irma, Maria, and the wildfires out West. A lot of the things that happened during those events really prevented businesses from meeting their goal of making money and paying their employees and paying taxes and giving back.
So I know José talked about the driver shortage or at least the perception of a driver shortage. And he is absolutely right. There were enough drivers. In this case it was not a supply problem. It was access, it was a crisis of connectivity. I am not going to touch on that. I do want to say what that impact was for the business community. Because they could not get their drivers, things sat at the port in Puerto Rico, or supplies were not able to make it to communities, so these have cascading effects on supply chains. One of the big examples that was touted in the news was all of the containers that were sitting at the port in San Juan. And not able to be pulled from the port and distributed. And people not knowing what was on those containers and so they ended up ordering more. You hear about not just shortages of food, but wasted food. Things that were over ordered or double shipped. When you look at that from a supply chain perspective, and if you look at what's called the bull whip effect of that, those are things that managing information can better help with. I will talk about one of the ways that our organization was able to support some of that. That was by placing some staff at the National Response Coordination Center. And gauging the temperature of the business community and passing that information along, helping to facilitate that information flow. There were coordination calls that were occurring on a daily basis from FEMA and DHS that were coordinating around needs. We set up a call specific to supply chain activities. So that those logistics needs, talking specifically about port infrastructure, talking about road closures, talking about the things that owners and operators of supply chains need to know. Those very operationally focused activities. Some of that has to do with things that are happening on the roads. Are the roads open? Are there curfews in place? Are there access and reentry concerns? And helping businesses, especially the smaller and medium-size businesses who may not have access to that information. Helping them understand how do they keep their business flowing.
Again, another thing that was affecting businesses' ability to keep things flowing was fuel. I always say that fuel shortages are a self-fulfilling prophecy. We can talk about panic buying, and FOMO, fear of missing out, and all of the concerns that go into public panic buying. But, anytime you think there will be a shortage, and I love this quote, someone said, "Hey I heard there was going to be a shortage, so we went and bought more fuel", and again there were challenges. The colonial pipeline concerns that affected all the way even up through North Carolina. The quotas that were put in place at the racks. The congestion that occurred because of those types of quotas and more people trying to draw fuel. All of those things were real. Again the cascading impacts that that had on supply chains, if you can't get fuel for your trucks you cannot haul groceries to the grocery store. Then you have shortages on the store shelves. So thinking about this in terms of highways, if there are challenges on the highways, and there is a constraint there, what does that mean for further down the supply chain. And ultimately to the consumer or disaster survivor?
So all of those things were working in concert to really affect transportation rates. The graph that we have here is the Florida and Texas trucking volume and rates following Irma and Harvey. What we saw was that the resource competition, whether it was because of the storm or other long-term factors, put pressure on pricing and increased pricing. The need to get supplies into Florida and Texas, given that both Florida and Texas are consumer states, meaning they import more than they export, and the competition for additional resources really had an effect on rates and capacity. I will add here that I heard over and over and over and over again that FEMA took my trucks or they took my drivers or they took my landing slots or my containers. I always love it when people say that to me because I say is your contract with FEMA or is your contract with whoever that trucking company is? Because they are the ones that are deciding how they want to honor that contract. And yeah, most of them will go where they are going to make more money. But the issue cannot be entirely forced onto FEMA as being the problem. So, FEMA is aware that their perception and their entry into the market, because they are a new player during disaster, does have an effect. They are looking at ways to do no harm in the future. As Mr. Dorko, who is the head of FEMA logistics likes to say, "Do no harm, how do we keep the private sector operating?" That information management is really important. Sharing what's really happening on the ground.
I am going to transition again here to talk about how businesses are responding, and kind of what they were seeing. I will use the example of the flooding in Houston. Businesses actually were pretty resilient. We know that one of the big grocery chains in Texas was able to get their stores open. They were able to get around some of the road closures. They were able to make it through the checkpoints. They were doing that in a variety of ways. They were using the available technology, the 501 or the road access technology. But they were also out there driving the routes. They had a partnership between two or three of the large retailers who would go out and drive the routes. They would share that information amongst all of those retailers. A success story that I heard recently was that they were also sharing that information back to the state and back to the D.O.T. so that they could update those routes. Knowing whether things were opened or closed. That was helping to expedite some of the freight movement. There was one company that they could not wait for the roads to be opened. So when we talk about supply chains that need to be agile and adaptable and aligned sometimes they need to be improvised. There was a medical supply company that needed to get some equipment supplies to a clinic. They could not wait, so they rented duck boats. I love that because trucks do not float, but fortunately ducks do.
There are a number of businesses who were able to overcome those challenges and they were able to give back to their communities. One example that I thought was really pretty cool, happened down in the Florida Keys where the narrow streets required some specialized equipment. And Estes trucking along with Home Depot, they have an existing relationship, they were able to put a driver or a couple of drivers in small flatbeds with forklifts on the back to do supplies-commodity distribution down there. That is a specialized equipment requirement. They did all of that for free. Trucks who were hauling generators, that ended up at police stations in Puerto Rico to keep the lights on; durable medical equipment, which it goes on the dry van, but there are some special equipment concerns there; Cops that needed to get within four hours to the shelter in Harris County so they could open the shelters, all of these things were traveled by truck and donated by groups like Estes, Cowan, and U.P.S., I say all of that because the community of transportation providers is incredibly generous. If you've not heard the story of what FedEx did for moving pets out of Miami Post Irma, I would urge you to go Google that and look at the rescue flight that they did. Just cool stuff that happens with logistics during disaster.
I am going to touch real quick on FEMA's after action report from 2017. I am not an expert on this by any means. But as an individual, as a logistician, I am very interested in their after action report. I encourage you to look at it and look beyond the headlines that have been in the news the past few days. Look really deeply at the five or six pages of the after action, dedicated to the logistics operations. There were challenges, but I do think that FEMA has laid out pretty well within their after action report how they are planning to change and respond. I pulled up a couple quotes looking at a comprehensive understanding of supply chains. I think they try to do this now, but really bringing in private sector partners and bringing in government at all levels. And a I hope that Persia will talk a little bit about the integration teams that they have going on in North Carolina now. But this means a lot for transportation folks at the local and state level. FEMA's after action, and then there strategic objective 2.3 and how commodities are distributed in future disasters.
Finally, I said I was going to close on a good news story. I shared a couple of those about what businesses were doing. But I also want to touch back to some of the things that José works on, which is when disaster donations go wrong, and a lot of stuff gets shipped to an area and it clogs supply chains because we know that communities want to help, and individuals really want to help, and businesses want to help and want to be involved. But the timing of when those supplies move into an area is critical. There were a large set of donations that were collected in DC, by the wife of a government official from Puerto Rico. They did not know what to do or where to turn to get those donations over to Puerto Rico. The transportation was expensive and there was no space on ships. A group of volunteers from the VOAD community, from the business community all got together and packed up the supplies, and they got them to the disaster survivors through a group that could do the local distribution. They got them there, not immediately after the disaster, but at a little later time, January timeframe, when some of the immediate supplies had started to go away. I love this picture because I think sometimes in our work we may focus on the forklifts or the trucks or the roads or the bridges. But beyond those very technical aspects, it is not just diapers that are being delivered. It is help, and it is hope and it is hygiene. It's everything that disaster survivors so sorely need. When you think about your work, think of it as highways to hope. Because keeping that infrastructure open and active is so critical to helping survivors after disaster. With that my time is done. I look forward to your questions.
Jennifer Symoun
Thank you Kathy. I know we do have a few questions. We will get to those after the next and final presentation. Our final presentation will be given by Persia Payne-Hurley, the developer and coordinator of the first operational Business Emergency Operations Center in the nation. She also serves as the administrator of North Carolina's Vendor Disaster Re-Entry Program. NC's Private Sector program is three years old, has over 350 corporate and business partners, has been fully integrated into the State Emergency Response Team, and has been called a national model by FEMA. The program was tested live during the Charlotte Civil Disturbance and the Hurricane Matthew Response with successful results.
Persia Payne-Hurley
Hey good afternoon everybody, I'm going to take about 18 or so minutes here and familiarize you with the North Carolina private sector program, the Business Emergency Operations Center, and the disaster vendor re-entry program, that is our credentialing program for post-disaster movement back into evacuated or restricted and curfewed areas. I want to thank all of the guys here on Talking Freight for inviting me and letting me have this chance. To give you an idea of what has happened, our program started in 2014, so it is relatively young. I want to say upfront because we have done quite a bit, but we still have a long way to go. This program has built capacity and resiliency into the state and it continues to support business operations. Because our hope is to keep logistical supply lines open always, and thereby, support the communities trying to recover.
First, I want to tell you guys, and surely you guys are familiar with North Carolina and how many times we tend to get activated per year, which seems to be 7 or more, but our primary mission is listed here. But the one I want to focus on is that it is a consequence to management but also to protect the life and property and ultimately to help communities recover. That's what we were looking towards with this program with the private sector.
With all of the types of disasters that we get involved in, natural and manmade, the fires, the hurricanes and all of the rest, we tend to use always an all hazard style approach. That approach is scalable. So we can expand and meet the needs of medium and large scale events. Here's just another picture of the kinds of things we get into. Natural and manmade as well as epidemics, and even the avian influenza, the bird flu, was probably our most recent exercise.
In order to expand and build better resilience, we have this vision to expand our team, to bring a private sector into the state emergency operations center, to build relationships, to expand our abilities, but ultimately to create a situation where we could return as quickly to normal operations as possible. And to allow the availability of goods to communities because a large number of our folks, for as many as evacuate there are just as many who shelter in place at home. And ultimately to minimize business losses. How are we going to do that? We were not sure at the time, but ultimately we knew our goal would be to do things faster. Because we tend to respond quickly, but we thought we could be faster with the private sector on our team to do that. We knew we could move in one direction with the one concerted effort and make things a lot smoother and with the inclusion and a lot better for everybody. Ultimately I like my last point to protect North Carolina's economic strength. Because that's what has happened in the end.
The private sector program is three parts: its partnership, its the business emergency operation center, and its re-entry as I mentioned before. Just to give you an idea of what happens during a partnership, or what the private sector earns by being members of this program. Of course our goals were to enhance situational awareness because we asked the question, what can we do for you? What could we do for the private sector? What could we do? Why would they be involved in this program? To improve their decision-making and to increase effectiveness because it would be increased if the private and public work together and to enhance the community.
That all sounds very nice and well and good, but what do they get in a concrete sense? I felt that it should be a lot clearer. What we first do, we give our private partners access to WebEOC which is our crisis management platform, also called NCSTARTUP, they also have access to the state's emergency operation center. Inside that crisis management platform we create custom views for our partners. So if you have more interest in say the status of hospitals in the state of North Carolina than in other things, we have hospital boards that do have access too. The real key for most folks I suspect is the real-time information. With access to WebEOC you are getting Within about 20 minutes of the government signature any declaration of emergency in the state, copies of transportation waivers, and that would be in their entirety, updates, and significant events posting inside WebEOC by all the counties in North Carolina, the D.O.T., and the state Highway Patrol, North Carolina National Guard, and various other agency partners like the Department of Commerce, agriculture, human services. Everyone is talking in one system. You're getting a common operating picture across the state of what is happening. To include, of course, status on power restorations, this is a direct feed to Duke Power, evacuations, curfews, the EOC boards which is something unique to my group. So we can look at what the counties are requesting, usually they are requesting resources that cannot be found at the state, we help to coordinate those, and of course road status. In a large-scale event D.O.T. typically updates us about twice a day with road status reports. The EOC representation is a physical and virtual program. I will mention that in a minute when I talk about the BEOC. That representation is physical. Private sectors are invited to brief on the state floor, listen to briefings, and sit in and listen to the governor's press conferences, and obviously do collaboration inside of the EOC face-to-face within the agency. We certainly provide training, and we involve the private sector in our exercises. There is something that is being called Persia's DISTRO. It is a quite large mailing list. I send out updates, before and during and after events.
The BEOC, this is the second leg, that was partnership, is inside the state EOC that is located in Raleigh. It is a virtual and physical hub as mentioned here, connecting private and public during disasters. It's difficult to see but in the center of that bottom picture, is my boss standing up in the situation room, Mike Sprayberry, a huge supporter of private and public partnerships and programs.
So our goals in the BEOC, I mentioned some of them, but I need to broadly state, the enhance communication coordination collaboration absolutely is happening. We are thrilled about that goal being met. To coordinate movements, resource requests from the counties I mentioned, and I also coordinate any offers from the private sector to the state for rental, at cost, for donation. There's a place on our board for the private sector to park those offers so that we can coordinate those as the needs arise. We encourage business-to-business mutual aid. Something new we are working on. It's been happening but we are formalizing it at this point.
So ultimately our objectives, those are the broad ones. With the more specific, and I will just pull a few them to expand the common operational picture. The situational awareness and information sharing that's really what it does. It expands the picture. So everyone knows at any given time what is happening, we are all aware of needs, and problems can be communicated back to the state. It's a two-way street from a communication standpoint and information sharing. And ultimately to support that pathway back to normal operations. By leveraging these capabilities and our expertise or experiences on the EM side and the private sector side, we assumed that it would work. And So far it shows that it has. We were able to resume normal business operations and normal day-to-day operations and communities a lot faster than North Carolina has ever been able to before. We are building greater resiliency because of that.
I just wanted to give you guys a shot of what the BEOC looks like inside the state EOC. There are 16 chairs in the business emergency operation center now. We are changing into this configuration as we speak. It is under construction. I just wanted to point out briefly that one of the groups in the BEOC that is a bit unusual is NC211, and they replace the governor's hotline. So multiple call centers across the state, NC211, it's the United Way, but the brain of the call center sits in the BEOC. So we have our hand on the pulse of the public in any given activation. And those reports come in twice a day on particular needs. So the private sector sort of has a heads up on what is happening out there in the public right now and before it turns into a problem.
The BEOC is arranged by sector. These are the sectors that are currently in the BEOC. One thing to note is that the pharmacy healthcare supplies equipment group used to be housed inside the retail sector. But they have grown so large now after the storms of 2016 that they have earned their own chair. These are the seats that I mentioned. They are physical and virtual seats. You guys may be familiar with most of these, the North Carolina financial recovery coalition might be someone that not everyone is aware of. This will be not just the large banks but also the small rural banks. It's an association that links all of them. And they particularly focus on risk management, they focus on how they can continue to operate, and they pool their resources as necessary. One other to note, Circle K is a chair because they have roughly 52 gas stations on North Carolina's core evacuation routes. So to monitor the evacuation, Circle K has been a great partner in giving us an idea of where we stand. "The Comms" includes all our communication partners. And on the right as you can see there, our virtual seats, our newest would be the North Carolina Restaurant and Lodging Association.
This slide is not all inclusive. I try to give an idea of what our partners look like. I kind of clustered them all together. As I said we are at about over 350 now, but I wanted to give you guys the idea of who's included in that number. What kind of companies. You will note there is a lot of logistic heavy companies including medical supply logistics companies and folks that supply unique items such as gas like oxygen and so forth to North Carolina area hospitals.
And finally, the last leg of our program is vendor re-entry. I want to just say that I know that this program has actually been around, well I should say the legislation that gives our authority to handle this program has been around since about 2007, but North Carolina emergency management had not really pushed this. Some of it was known among the counties, but since we started this program we have really tried to give voice to it. And it's a general statute that actually gives us the authority to administer this program. And that statute permits critical infrastructure restoration. It explains that our citizens have the right to critical services. It permits the movement of supplies and equipment and permits essential business activities to resume in restricted or curfew areas in an emergency event. This is something that is almost considered a recovery area of the agency, but we have seen this during response.
This is a picture of our re-entry certification. It's a piece of paper or possibly a PDF. We have had people use it on iPhones. And I want to explain what it is. Because I know folks are thinking what is it? This is a statewide program. It's the first statewide program in the nation. It is an annual renewable program. It is presented to law enforcement when we have those curfew and restricted areas, set-ups or barricades. It is set up in a priority of access. As you can see there. It can be copied and distributed and displayed. And it is something that is controlled by the company, our partner in the private sector, not controlled by us. And it is free. We found it to be a win-win in most cases since it allows business to go back into restricted areas, get backup generator power going, get tents to assess damage, or to set things up so they can get their doors open. Certainly it supports the recovery. Since we have started this program has been copied by Florida and South Carolina.
The big question that I always get at this point is, "Hey, does this really work? It sounds really great." And this is a little bit of a busy chart. My husband calls this my eye test chart. I just want to say to you briefly, and you can read the details yourself. We call this the Business B. Down the stem you will see the blue sky operations that we do that include training, including monthly WebEOC exercises, state exercises, BEOC TTX's like the one we are having this fall. Allowing partners to gain access to WebEOC doing training on WebEOC itself and general partner sharing of information that I do. I do a lot of visiting and developing of this program and other concepts of operations and on our recovery, but when that red star happens, an event occurs, you will see us get into a battle with them. It is outlined by the black arrows. So the BEOC is activated with the state EOC, the BEOC chairs are called to the EOC. And the private sector partners logon to WebEOC and begin monitoring an event. Prior to that, usually about 24 hours, there's an email that goes out through our distribution system that lets folks know that we expect that the governor is going to declare a state of emergency tomorrow at X time. Usually I give a time. 10 AM or noon or whatever. So the real-time information sharing begins, in an expected event situation, before that event actually occurs. And the distribution of information begins happening and the monitoring of the crisis platform. As the counties begin to logon and state highway patrol and DOT and all of the other agencies start to put in that tick-by-tick information, the private sector partners are watching. And we begin with situation reports after the executive orders and transportation orders are sent out. Coordination calls. As you can see it kind of goes on from there. So I am not going any further on that, but to say that it kind of continues on day-to-day as long as we are activated, we continue on to include coordinating private sector offers at cost, for lease, or for donations on the fly. And we can do re-entry now in about 20 minutes.
So the example I want to leave with you that shows this program and how we handled it. Colonial Pipeline direct break September 9th, 2016. And you guys all remember it. In our state we lost approximately 30 percent of North Carolina's fuel supply. The western part of the state was the first to go dry. And this process of having a shortage went on for roughly 10/11 days. We hoped for a speedy repair and a bypass to the affected area, but it wasn't until many of the gas stations were already out of fuel by the time we got that repair in place. So we used tankers to move fuel around the Florida Peninsula to the Wilmington Port on the eastern part of the state so that it could be trucked in. So we kind of held steady as fuel slowly began to trickle back into the state. So it took a long time to get the repair, relatively long. And then fuel began to come online. The problem was about 24-hours later a group of people spilled on to I-95 in Charlotte starting the first of multiple demonstrations in reaction to a shooting in that city. This went on for several days. Of course we were now working at that time we would have been working three events. We had the activation for the pipeline break, we had flooding in Northeastern North Carolina, and that's when the civil commotion began. We had multiple events going at this point. That's important to note. Because we would have been giving reports and information updates to our partners on all three events. The mayor of Charlotte ordered a curfew within two days for Midnight to 6:00 AM, and just as fuel started coming back into the state, you can imagine this was critical. Because those hours just happen to be exactly the same time as when the tankers would like to move into the city and resupply stations. So we issued about 26 re-entry certifications on the fly. Essential business employees were getting back into their businesses during those curfew hours. And those tankers were taking the necessary action to move fuel into the city. So it is helpful to note that about 11 days after the riots, that hurricane Matthew made landfall. So I'm just giving you this example so that you can see that through multiple and simultaneous and back to back activations. We were able to continue communicating and sharing information and keep the logistical supply chains open, and ultimately to keep businesses operating. That was the most important thing to us.
So I have given you the skinny on the BEOC and response for critical operations. And this is still, keep in mind, this is a relatively young program. We are still adjusting and tweaking and we welcome input from observers or users on how we can be more effective and I certainly welcome that from this group. That is the end of my presentation. I thank you all for listening.
Jennifer Symoun
Alright thank you Persia. We are now going to move into the Q and A session. And Persia, we have a number of questions for you, and since you just finished, we will go ahead and start with those, and then I'll go back to the other presenters. So the first question for you is, "What types of waivers does North Carolina offer and are their conditions that would allow for the issuance of these waivers?"
Persia Payne-Hurley
So I am assuming that you are talking about transportation waivers. Typically what we find, is at the same time that an executive order goes out from here by governor declaring a state of emergency. We have him sign a transportation waiver at the same time. We are talking about, that is waiving over-size, over-hours, and especially to move supplies in and out of the state and around the state. Usually that waiver continues on for the duration of the activation. We had these last four storms communicated back to our private sector partners, saying, "Hey guys, we are thinking of terminating the transportation waiver. Is there anybody that is still moving supplies that needs to be covered by the waiver?" Folks typically come back and say, "I am good," or "I need one more day," and then we extend that another day. I don't know if there's any members of mine online listening that would confirm that. But we typically get that input and make a decision based on that.
Jennifer Symoun
Thank you. Another question for you, "What type of challenges with private industry has NC had that you had to work through?"
Persia Payne-Hurley
I would say that probably one of the challenges that we have had has to do with, I think it's more of an assumption on the public side rather than the private side. On the public side of business, the public side tends to believe that private sectors all have one interest in mind, their own business, or have two interests in mind. Perhaps being vendors to the state primarily, they do not understand what a lot of companies are doing, and their willingness to cooperate with getting communities back on their feet. I would say the biggest challenges have probably been on our side. Since I do not have former state experiences as an employee, I wasn't as familiar with the kind of challenges. That would be the biggest surprise I would say. On the lighter side, I can tell you that the most competitive group sector is the communication sector by far. They have a chair at the BEOC, but none of them is allowed to sit in it. It is kind of an inside joke that we have.
Jennifer Symoun
Alright. "Were the BEOC volunteers asked to participate? Or did they volunteer on their own?"
Persia Payne-Hurley
They volunteer on their own. I typically will go to a sector and say, like I did with Med-Pharm, "You guys are growing very big." I talked to each of them and send them out a note. You guys are growing quite big, we are going to need a BEOC chair to represent you. Typically folks will come back and say we would like to propose this association or that association to it.
Jennifer Symoun
Alright, and another question for you, "The response plans will need to adjust to field conditions such as bridge collapses, road closures, etcetera. Are you employing any special techniques to improve the speed and accuracy of the field status information?"
Persia Payne-Hurley
There is a couple of things, North Carolina has a program that we have used a few times, when we had the mudslides here just with tropical storm Alberto was going through, and that is through the use of drones. Heavy use in fact. Our risk management group had trained with them, and used them to make assessments. And we have really decreased the amount of time that it takes to get a clear picture of what is happening. In terms of damage assessment, or what is needed, so that counties can do the necessary request to the state and on up to get support. Especially in the manner of closed roads, which we had a few during the mudslides as you guys may recall just a few weeks ago. I hope I answered your question.
Jennifer Symoun
Alright, if anyone wants any clarifications, just feel free type it in. "I understand the immediate front line in a disaster/catastrophe event is the homeless shelters and staff - these are the ones 'in the trenches' and who would most likely offer assistance in those critical first 48-72 hours. Is there any representation by these folks at any ECO table? And is there any support system that can be bolstered for the shelters?" And Persia, I will turn to you first, but I should also mention any of the other presenters feel free to jump in as well.
Persia Payne-Hurley
Okay, I think he is talking about the VOAD free volunteer organizations. I believe that is what your question is about, so a bit of clarity. In North Carolina emergency management, we are organized by ICS, not by ESF. So we are broken into breakout areas such as infrastructure, plans, logistics, human services, that's one, and BEOC is another functional area, and the group you are talking about falls under human services. And typically those volunteers, even in a situation where we have just come through, say a hurricane landfall. The private sector folks with re-entry, they are going to be back in those areas before volunteers, if they have been cleared and it is safe to return. That is just a matter of the support to the community. The direct resupply the community. Especially those people that are sheltering in place is a priority. Certainly, the first responders are in ahead of that. The first responders, for life safety, and the private sector immediately following.
Jennifer Symoun
Alright, "Do you work in a cluster based groups to manage the response cooperation for different relief sectors?"
Persia Payne-Hurley
I think that one is for Kathy.
Kathy Fulton
Sure, I will take that one. Thanks Persia. So we looked to the workgroup program logistics cluster as a model for coordination, but we are not specifically organized around food or hydration or medical. I think that as you look at the VOAD community, voluntary organizations active in disaster, that community as a whole, those organizations do kind of self-organize. They have workgroups or committees focused on specific areas. Whether that be sheltering or feeding, mass care or emotional/spiritual care. In that sense, the VOAD community forms those clusters and then they have their own partnerships with the business community and government entities. Persia mentioned that North Carolina uses the ICS structure, incident command structure. Other locations use the emergency support function structure. An emergency support function will have those types of clusters. They are not necessarily called the cluster system like is used on the international scale though.
Jennifer Symoun
Thank you. Let's see, Persia I think this one is for you. "During the pipeline rupture, had you already discussed a process for giving priority to first responders and critical infrastructure?"
Persia Payne-Hurley
Yeah we have actually, under our re-entry process that I mentioned before. That is a phased system. So when we do the certification and the company registers, you have a designation of which typically is life, health-safety, and economic well-being. Those are the three phases. The counties have recently come back to me and say they would want to look at narrowing that down to two phases. Likely it will be life and health safety/economic well-being will be combined. The life folks, that's pretty self-explanatory. We're talking about first responders and we are talking about critical infrastructure like power, natural gas, communications. So Health Safety, certainly we are talking about, not just pharmacy, but it includes grocery, and it includes home construction, and a lot of the businesses that are going to allow people to begin to recover. The final one, economic well-being, is everyone else everybody that does business in North Carolina can fall into that category. I need to make a note here that this phase does not necessarily mean that we follow it strictly. Because we have to be flexible. If the critical infrastructure is banking, then we are talking about a change in priority. Because there are circumstances where the critical commodity or the critical sector may not be one that has already been listed, say in health safety versus economic well-being. And that is determined ahead of time. So that is probably what you are getting too. So renewals for this year for instance started May 1. And we probably have over 100 folks of 300 that are registered for re-entry, have updated their information, and they have already been certified. So they are ready to go.
Jennifer Symoun
Alright, thank you. Another question for you, "With three events after the other, did you find you needed to do something different for the EM staff since they were on so long so many days in a row? Have you considered a different staffing plan going forward?"
Persia Payne-Hurley
From the time the Colonial Pipeline, which was the first incident that year, we were on a normal schedule thankfully. Like an 8:00 to 5:00. There was some special consideration to the North Carolina Patrol and convenience store marketers and those guys who are my partners that were putting in a lot long hours not necessarily here, but just by the nature of the disaster. By the time we had flooding in Northern North Carolina, before the riots, we did not get into 24 hour operations, would be 12-hour shifts, until the riots began. We had gotten a little bit of sleep up to that point, so we were ready. With no idea certainly that we were going to have what I later called the trifecta. So from a staffing standpoint, the BEOC is 12 hours, 7:00 to 7:00, but The EOC and my backup overnight was 24 hours.
Jennifer Symoun
Alright. Thank you. So I think we've gotten through all the questions for you right now. But anybody can feel free to type more questions for Persia in. I am going to read a question that just came in for José and then I am going to go back up to the top of the list. So Jose a question for you, "Can you discuss what kind of geographic areas are most vulnerable to suffering catastrophic events rather than 'merely' disaster events?"
Jose Holguin-Veras
Well, it is very hard to make generalizations on the basis of geographic areas. Because again it depends on the proximity to let's say earthquakes, suns, and the like. It's very hard to say. You have basically, in the case of Japan, you have not only a single catastrophe because you have multiple and multiple cities on the coast of the Tohoku coast were impacted, basically many catastrophes if I may say. Entire cities like Minamisanriku, was wiped out, I mean Kesennuma, Ishinomaki and they basically, their leadership in most cases was wiped out. Major death counts, everybody dying. It is very hard to say what types of areas. Basically, that depends on what are the risk factors. In the case of Puerto Rico it's a small island, basically, the probability of a catastrophic event like Maria, that was fairly high. And cities like L.A., in which there are fault lines going through, that also is basically a major risk. The Cascadia in the Northwest of the U.S. is also in serious risk of catastrophic events. But it is very difficult to say what type of geography. Because it could be small or big depending on the fact.
Kathy Fulton
This is Kathy. If I can just add to that. I think that with today's supply chains being global in nature, geography is less of a concern than a disruption to a supply chain or inputs to a supply chain. Even, Doctor Holguin-Veras mentioned the Japan triple disaster which had effects in the U.S. That wasn't the geography of the U.S. that caused that, but it was the nature of supply chains. So when you are destroying not just the capacity that has been produced of a particular product, component, whatever in a supply chain, but you destroy the capability to produce that component. That is when you really get into the challenges between a disaster, a catastrophe, and not so much geographically [Sound cut out].
Jennifer Symoun
Alright, thank you. Let's see, we have another question. I think this is for Kathy. Anyone feel free to jump in. "Have consideration of safe storage of products and the delivery of those products of the area impacted been considered for recovery and restart processes for the local business and government to restart and this way speed the 'back to normal process'?"
Kathy Fulton
So I think, and if you whoever asked the question wants to jump in, but I think the question is about pre-positioning of supplies. To an extent that is possible, I know that a lot of government entities do that. I know that a lot of businesses will keep their, for a notice event, like the hurricanes, I know a lot of businesses were keeping their trucks just outside of the area of expected impact. So that then you can rapidly get the supplies into an area and get your activities restarted. The challenge with that is if you guess wrong and you put your supplies in an area that ends up getting wiped out, then you have lost that, and you have to move things from further away. But yeah it is critically important to know where you can pre-position your supplies so that you can restart activities.
Jennifer Symoun
Alright, thank you, and Kathy, "What is your perspective on how organizations like Team Rubicon factor into aid/recovery operations?"
Kathy Fulton
So our nation could not afford to do the work that the voluntary agencies do post-disaster. The number of hours that organizations like Team Rubicon and other voluntary organizations active in disaster, VOAD groups, perform is astounding. It's literally millions and millions and millions of dollars worth of labor, of donated supplies, of care, support for disaster survivors. Again, it would be impossible. So what is my perspective? I think that we could not get along as a nation without those organizations, and I am proud that we support them, I am proud that our business partners support them. I just think that the relationships that we see from those nonprofit organizations like TR and others are phenomenal. I am glad to know that someone on the webinar is familiar with groups like TR.
Jose Holguin-Veras
This is Jose I would like to add to that. In my comments earlier, I spoke basically about the amount of work done by groups like this. Volunteers from the VOAD system, and all of those groups simply emerge in disaster response. I have to say that in terms of for instance, the manpower of the staff and volunteers that go to disaster areas, about I would guess 90% easily are volunteers, 90%, probably more. In the original days of a disaster, all these non-established relief groups, emerging, expanding, extending, all of these groups they typically deliver the big chunk of the relief supplies that reach the disaster. After that, when the official response basically gets moving, they delivered more supplies. But again in the initial stage of the response the volunteers, these local social networks, are the ones that are typically the ones that save the day.
Jennifer Symoun
Alright, thank you. Another question here, I will open this up to any of the presenters who want to jump in. "As we know each disaster has its unique characteristics. In reality, how do you forecast demand in advance and rapidly establish an information network? Do you rely on historical data for prediction? How do you make the tradeoff between being responsive and efficient in terms of logistics cost under uncertainty in such situations?"
Jose Holguin-Veras
I would like to take this one.
Jennifer Symoun
Sure, go ahead.
Jose Holguin-Veras
Every disaster is different in the same way that every person is different to the others. Technically speaking we are all different but we all share the same biology. All disasters in the same way, there are common features, and there are common activities. It is not like each disaster is completely new there are a lot of commonalities. What we need to try to achieve is to have flexible responses. Responses that are able to somehow move to what is needed. And the key element of that is the recognition that effective disaster response is a whole community effort. Basically in ways the private sector contributes a piece, the local social networks contribute another piece, and the official sector, I mean does their part. It has to be a whole community effort. It has to be a civic effort in essence. That requires coordination among all of the sectors. Because again, not only do we need to develop bridges of communication between the official, between the public sector and the private sector, it is equally important to develop basically a connection with the local social networks. Because they are the ones that you will need to rely on in the case of catastrophic events. Basically building and creating these logistic communities and roundtables whatever you want to name it. You have to involve everybody from churches, local community groups, private sectors, major companies, etcetera, etcetera. We need to have whole representation of society.
Kathy Fulton
I will just add to that. Relationships are everything. And the resilience of the community absolutely depends on how tight those social bonds were prior to the disaster. From a pure supply chain perspective how do you predict that demand? It is constrained optimization. It is a series of constrained optimizations. But you also can look at certain things, you know the demand is going to be pretty much the same for consumables right. People are not going to suddenly start eating twice as many calories just because a disaster has occurred. They need to replace the calories that they had. But Durable goods, you have to look over a much longer historical period in order to do those predictions of demand. So there are models out there, there are supply chain models out there. The models are continually refined to predict that demand. How accurate are they? How much to take into consideration, all of the factors that is up for debate. I think that from a predictability of demand, on a global scale it is pretty consistent. You have to look at population migration. There are a lot of factors, but again it is all math at the end of the day.
Persia Payne-Hurley
I wanted to jump in a bit here too, and I agree with both of what the other speakers said for sure and with a bit of a caveat. We take a lot of information from past disasters. We look at those. You look at what the demands look like and what the needs were, and of course that can change with the times, but there does appear to be, what is happening is exactly what Kathy said It comes down to math. We have a certain amount of demand for certain products. With NC211, I mentioned as I was speaking that they replaced the Governor's hotline. Depending on the type of event we would get calls for things that maybe we did not expect. 400 to 4,000 calls saying people are concerned about they cannot find bottled water or batteries. We were getting that stuff away right away, so our private sector partners can respond and kind of note that. And it does depend I think on the event. But we also have similar situations in different events where people call and say we cannot find cash machines that have any cash and the banks aren't open. And then we know there is more of a demand for cash vending. So I guess it just depends on what has happened for sure. But there is some historical merit to making estimates that way.
Jose Holguin-Veras
I wanted to add something about the importance of connections that Kathy mentioned. I'm going to refer to one of the interviews that we have done. In our field work in disaster, we have interviewed thousands of people. One of the most memorable quotes was given to me by a priest. That referring to the crisis after Haiti He mentioned to me, "A capsize is not the moment to learn how to swim. That is simply too late." In essence the fundamental insight of this priest was basically that you need to have the connections way before the disaster. Because when the disaster happens if you do not have the connections you are going to suffer.
Jennifer Symoun
Alright, all very good thoughts. We have one more question. And I think that's about all we have time for, but I think it is the last question we have not gotten to. "The 'support in' is one origin-destination transportation flow. The 'product-service out' is the re-structuring factor that needs help to be addressed to help with the overall resilience and sustainability process. Otherwise, how are systems building on sustainability and self-sustaining actions? Anyone have any thoughts on that?"
Kathy Fulton
This is Kathy. I will jump in because the immediate case that comes to mind is the pharmaceutical manufacturing on Puerto Rico after the disaster. And there was such a focus on getting supplies in that, I think that at some point, we lost sight of the need to manufacture to keep the economic health of the population going. One example has to do with oxygen, compressed gas, and the oxygen plants on the island were down. Well you think of oxygen, you think of medical needs. You think of people who are in hospitals who need that oxygen for respiratory survival. But there was also a secondary use for that oxygen, which had to do with filling the IV bags that are used around the world. And a huge percentage of them are manufactured in Puerto Rico. So there was that secondary effect of hey we are trying to solve one problem but we are not thinking about the long-term impacts of our actions. So we are diverting all of this oxygen just to go and to do the immediate life safety things, was there a tradeoff there that other people's medical conditions were negatively impacted because of that.
Jennifer Symoun
Thank you, any other thoughts?
Jose Holguin-Veras
No
Jennifer Symoun
Alright, well I think we have made it through all of the questions, and we are about at end time, so I do want to thank all three of our presenters. I also want to thank everybody for attending today. The recording will be posted online within the next few weeks on the Talking Freight website, and I will send out an email once it is available. Registration is not yet available for the August 15 webinar, but once it is I will send information through the Freight Planning LISTSERV. The Freight Planning LISTSERV is the primary means of sharing information about upcoming seminars. So if you are not already a member I encourage you to join it if you have not already done so. So with that we will close out, and thank you everybody and enjoy the rest of your day.
