There are many interesting and tragic aspects to the earthquake in Haiti and its aftermath. From the operational side, the disaster highlights the importance of one of the emerging sub-fields of “humanitarian logistics”.
Both the BBC (“Haiti earthquake maps“) and the Wall Street Journal (“Aid Efforts Face Obstacles in Quake-Ravaged Capital“) devoted articles to the issue documenting the overwhelming logistical tasks presented with the rescuers.
Military and aid groups began to encounter huge obstacles getting relief into the country, less than two days after the earthquake killed an estimated 45,000 to 50,000 people. U.S. military specialists reestablished communications at the Port-au-Prince airport, but a lack of fuel and a crammed tarmac prompted the Haitian government to halt incoming flights. While one airport runway was usable, air-traffic control was limited, able to handle only four aircraft at a time, logistics companies said.
The quake also damaged Haiti’s main port in Port-au-Prince. The port has “collapsed and is not operational,” said Maersk Line’s Mary Ann Kotlarich.
The disarray at the port stands to be a major obstacle to the relief effort, as the U.S. Navy and other ships carrying supplies have nowhere to dock. Numerous maritime companies are trying to devise stop-gap solutions, but nothing is in place yet.
From a purely operational point of view (and while abstracting from the specific case), the problem is not very different from any regular operational one: the main challenges are limited resources and coordination of the (relief) efforts. In the case of Haiti the significant damage to the infrastructure hampers the ability to deliver supplies, where the airports became bottlenecks that are causing delays in the ability to respond to the different needs. The lack of communication is also attributed to the collapse of this type of infrastructure, which hindered the ability to coordinate among the different relief effort groups:
There have been a lot of criticism from local authorities about the relief efforts, but in all fairness, if we could catch a break and get some communication up and running, things would go a lot faster,”
What can be done? In a recent podcast (Haiti: Humanitarian Logistics) Prof. Pinar Keskinocak and Prof. Julie Swann discuss what can be done. According to their opinion, managing the relief supply chain is not very different (in certain aspects, of course,) from managing a product supply chain – everything begins with understanding the demand, and understanding the political and social conditions. In this case, it means assessing the needs of the people in the different locations.
What could have been done? There is a long list of things a country should do to prepare for such disasters (or lower magnitude ones), but I will not get to these. The one highlighted by Pinar and Julie that is of particular interest (at least for this blog) is the pre-positioning of inventory of relief supplies in areas that are more prone to such disasters to reduce the lead-time between the disaster and the rescue response. Of course, these will only suffice for a short amount of time in case of an earthquake of such magnitude, but it is something to think about. We usually discuss pooling of inventory, but this seems to be a case where spreading inventory makes a lot of sense.
Coming from a country where earthquakes are common (Peru), I find this discussion particularly interesting. If you take a look at the data on earthquakes and victims, there is some correlation between poverty rates and casualties. Hence, while the pre-positioning of inventory relief supplies is a step in the right direction, one has to consider that the involved humanitarian agencies are most likely trying to mitigate the needs of peoples that are extremely poor and lacking resources on a good day (never mind after an earthquake). I think many NGOs might find it hard to warehouse, say, medical supplies, for a disaster situation when they work in what already is a disaster area by virtue of its poverty.
Where I’m going with this is that, in my view, it might be more productive to think of humanitarian logistics in some sort of lexicographical framework. For example, in a very poor area, before warehousing any other supplies, you might need to secure wireless communication lines — radio transmitters, some minimal form of civil defense organization that can do triage within smaller geographic areas. In an impoverished area, one must assume that electricity and telephone lines will be out of commission.
Patricia,
That’s a very good point. At the same time one has to note that many of these activities are handled by NGO’s which seem to rarely coordinate their efforts on a regular basis. It is true that many of these NGOs, such as Oxfam, contribute both in cases of emergencies (such as the earthquake) and on a regular basis (by promoting education and health in these regions). However, there are many organization that specialize in a reaction to one type of disaster (or hardship) and given the decentralized type of decision, pre-positioning of inventory (among other ideas) is something they should (and probably do) promote.
Very true. It seems there is a need for coordination “rehearsals” when the local government collapses/disappears as it has in Haiti (vis a vis Indonesia and Thailand in 2004). In general, some level of coordination between the agencies should be relatively easy to achieve and it would help enormously. Even when you have a government in place, the coordination is bumpy (e.g., Peru in August 2007).
I am troubled by something that seems to be happening in Haiti and it almost appears to be necessary to get the flow of donations going in the US: diverting valuable landing/take off slots in an overwhelmed airport for flights that have big media impact (journalists and celebrities coming in, evacuating orphans…). The example that comes to mind was mentioned by CNN: two flights with medical personnel and supplies from Médecins Sans Frontières were diverted to the Dominican Republic, while a senator from PA was allowed to land and later take off with a group of orphans. Assuming these media events are a necessary evil to get additional resources, how should they be balanced in an overall effort?
This morning in NPR, there was an additional story about disaster research following the Haiti earthquake.
One part of the report that I found interesting (and it makes absolute sense to me) is the following one:
And something I find intriguing: in both reports, the one linked in Gad’s entry and this NPR one, the researchers interviewed are all women.
Besides donating my own money to Haiti, I will continue to pray for them. Lifting everything up to Heaven for them.
Too much of the discussion on Haiti is done on a retrospective basis. What is needed is more forward thinking on the solutions.
This is not the first disaster ever encountered. The coordination problems in Haiti are similar to the problems after the tsunami and the hurricane in the gulf coast. When the disaster occurs, people spring into action. The disconnect occurs because those with the ability to help are rarely those with the resources to fund it. But with advances in technology, this inefficiency can finally be address.
What is different now is our ability to communicate with each other during the rescue, stabilization and rebuilding stages. In prior disasters, people on the ground faced communication bottlenecks in voicing the urgency of their concerns. On the flip side, senior management at relief agencies suffered from poor decision-making due to inaccurate or untimely information from the field.
Texting and twitter address the communications bottleneck by empowering the grassroots. We are now at the point where relief agencies are verifying the credibility of requests via twitter. I worked for an NGO in Haiti and used to spend a week preparing monthly reports and a month preparing annual reports. Today, those reports are still being produced but they serve a different purpose. No longer are they the basis for decision-making and resource-allocation. Minute-by-minute twitter updates have emerged as a trusted source of information both within NGOs and across NGOs. In fact, credible news outlets are sourcing their stories from the openness and authenticity of twitter.
Haiti benefits from a strong telecommunications infrastructure as a result of Digicel offering superior mobile deployment and Lucent/Alcatel offering WiMAX in the country. More needs to be done to increase utilization of these services by the populace, many of whom are illiterate and technology-challenged. As this occurs, the quantity of messaging will be sure to increase.
The next problem to solve is the quality of the messaging. As the level of chaos increases, curation of data will become an important service for those listening in. I am part of a program that uses field inputs from NGO workers to assess top-level responsiveness and overall effectiveness. The Disaster Accountability Project was launched after Katrina and it is being used in Haiti as well. But this is one of many projects. I have been most inspired by Ushahidi, a citizen empowerment project started in Kenya to report and reduce post-election violence. That system is now being used to reduce the incidence of stock-out of needed medical supplies in Africa as well as to map the incidence of crimes in Atlanta, Georgia. Ushahidi is now operating in Haiti with the initial goal of aiding in the rescue effort.
I started this response with a call for more forward thinking and would like to end on that note. The pace of communication is quickly approaching the speed of thought. More thought leadership needs to be developed on the ways innovations in the way we correspond with each other can be deployed and better managed. While I appreciate the supply chain approach suggested by the operations professors at Georgia Tech, I honestly believe that a better solution lies in perfecting the union of values, thoughts and actions.
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Hermann Mazard is a professor of innovation at NYU-Poly, the engineering school of New York University. He is a Haitian American and holds degrees from Dartmouth College and the Kellogg School at Northwestern. To continue this conversation, he can be reached at http://twitter.com/HermannM.