ideas: on policy

After the fires, logistics matters

My day job has me writing about, among other similarly exciting topics, logistics and supply chain management. Mostly that’s about moving freight, warehouse design and procurement policy. Sometimes it’s about life and death.

I wrote this piece for the February edition of SupplyChain Review magazine. I thought it a timely reminder…

Russell Broadbent is a Victorian MP whose electorate of McMillan, like too many, has been unimaginably devastated by the most deadly fires in the history of settlement.

Broadbent had seen the tragedy first-hand, both living in the path of the blazes and as a volunteer firefighter. He returned to parliament in Canberra days later to deliver an emotional plea:

“If you are a person anywhere in Australia who has experience in logistics, resource management or fire planning and you have not come forward yet, please come forward.”

“And if you are someone who in the future might like to be trained in that area, these are the men and the women who have been working behind the scenes: in administration, catering — normal things that are not on the front page of the paper. But they are equally important as those who are on the fire front.”

Logisticians did their best to coordinate containment of uncontainable blazes across the State. They were among the first on the scene to manage rescue and relief efforts. They will be called upon in a variety of ways to coordinate a recovery task that will take many years. They are invaluable and in-demand.

Disaster inevitably brings out the best in people. It is certainly when the supply chain needs to be at its strongest, where the skills of logistics professionals are really put to the test.

In the north of the country, flooding has put dozens of homes under water and devastated communities. Some residents have been cut off from basic amenities for over a month. The coordination task of clean up and repair is logistics on a daunting scale.

At least it was before unstoppable fire fronts swept through so many rural communities in Victoria — over 1,000 homes lost, more than 200 people dead, with a relief and reconstruction task worth billions with unforeseeable timelines. Here, the logistics task is very much life and death.

The Army has been brought in to coordinate the massive displacement. As they do so superbly in war zones overseas — and this may be as close to a war zone as peacetime Australia will see — their specialist logistics teams are pitching tents, feeding and clothing the homeless and working with emergency workers and volunteers in the recovery efforts.

Logistics support is everywhere: in the emergency response, from government agencies to frontline brigades coordinating firefighting and prevention efforts; in the grim task of recovering and storing more bodies than existing morgues have ever had to cope with; among the community service groups and charity organisations who are taking in hundreds of survivors; the government and aid groups distributing the millions of dollars in donations, food and household items to those most in need; farm groups coordinating the logistics of an emergency fodder program to source and distribute the large amounts of feed required for surviving livestock; and a task just beginning to rebuild communities burnt beyond recognition.

Those at the frontline of logistics have given generously. One of our journalists traveled to Whittlesea in the aftermath of the destruction to witness local transport operators donating refrigerated trailers to provide storage for the tonnes of sustenance needed to feed an army of homeless. The transporters do so thanklessly, like so many of their transport and logistics colleagues.

Because while much of the task is about strategy on paper, about freight distribution, logistics is ultimately about serving people. Only in disaster, perhaps, are we reminded of that. As Broadbent said in Parliament:

“In times such as these of unprecedented trauma when faced with an inescapable disaster from a near indestructible force, all we can rely on is each other. Sadly … there are so many who cannot even do that.”

And that’s why supply chain management matters.

© 2009 importance of ideas….