Analyst Insight:  Logistics accounts for up to 80% of relief organizations’ disaster budgets. Sadly, as much as 40% of those expenditures are wasted because of the significant rush, duplication of effort, and inefficiencies involved. 

It all adds up to a considerable opportunity for the logistics industry to change the narrative in a meaningful way, simply by doing what it does best.   

Everyone knows that effective disaster relief wouldn’t be possible without the many amazing medical professionals, first responders and humanitarian organizations who show up to help. However, if logistics professionals don’t also add themselves to that list of unsung heroes, they’re selling themselves short — and under-estimating the life-changing potential that their expertise brings to the table.   

To illustrate, here are four examples of just how useful some of our industry’s most common services and assets can be when applied to post-disaster relief efforts. 

Trucking. Year-in and year-out, the largest number of requests that ALAN receives involve trucking, and understandably so. Even if humanitarian organizations already have most of their transportation arranged, they often need even more to meet the surge and ensure that food, hydration, medical supplies, tarps and other supplies reach disaster sites as quickly as possible.  

Material handling equipment. Whether loaned for weeks or donated indefinitely, MHE can do much of the heavy lifting that pop-up hospitals, shelters, mass feeding operations and other humanitarian facilities urgently need in order to receive, process and distribute critical relief supplies more quickly.   

For instance, the six electric pallet jacks that our donors provided to a Florida food bank after Hurricane Ian allowed it to distribute millions of pounds of food to hurricane survivors in just a few weeks, while the pallet jack that was donated to a Connecticut non-profit during the pandemic enabled it to handle the 30% uptick in demand it experienced almost overnight. 

Warehousing. While many relief organizations have their own distribution centers, they almost always need extra places to store last-minute donations or to receive and stage the many supplies that are only needed at the very last minute, like the swift-water rescue boats that a donor helped us handle after Hurricane Florence. 

Donated warehouse space also enables humanitarian groups to accept many product contributions like cleaning supplies or building materials that they’d otherwise have to turn away due to lack of storage capacity.  

Supply chain recovery. Thus far, everything mentioned above has been tied to donated logistics services — and we could cite many more. But no account of the critical role that logistics professionals can play in disaster relief would be complete without also sharing this: In a 2020 National Academies research study about post-disaster resilience, researchers cited that the communities whose day-to-day supply chains were restored the most quickly — getting things like grocery stores and pharmacies restocked — recovered faster than communities that had to rely on temporary relief operations for longer periods of time.  

So even if “all” you’re doing after a disaster is trying to restore a normal supply chain flow to a hard-hit area, you’re still contributing to better long-term outcomes. 

Outlook:  Although logistics professionals may not have the medical skills of a first responder, there’s a lot they can do to advance the cause of disaster relief — and thankfully many already are.        

Resource Link:

www.alanaid.org