- Welcome to MIT Supply Chain Frontiers from the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics. Each episode features center researchers and staff or experts from the field for in-depth conversations about business, education, and beyond.

- Welcome to today's episode of Supply Chain Frontiers brought to you by the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics. I'm Benjy Kantor, and today we're gonna be talking to Tim Russell and Lauren Finegan of CTL's Humanitarian Supply Chain Lab. Tim, Lauren, nice to have you.

- Great to be here.

- Thanks for having us.

- The mission of the MIT Humanitarian Supply Chain Lab is to understand and improve the supply chain systems behind public services and private markets to meet human needs. Tim Russell, one of our two guests, is a research engineer at the MIT Humanitarian Supply Chain Lab. He's worked on humanitarian supply chains across the Caribbean, Latin America, former Yugoslavia and East Africa. Tim's also graduate of the MIT Supply Chain Management masters program here at CTL. And Lauren Finegan is a research associate here at the lab. Lauren supports research sponsored by government agencies and promotes evidence-informed policy through outreach with public and private stakeholders. And she's also an MIT grad having her intern master's in technology and policy here. So actually to start off, I'd love to hear just a little bit of general information about Humanitarian Supply Chain Lab, particularly with regard to disaster preparedness and response work. What are the kind of things that you are working on?

- Thanks, Benjy. So I guess I'll start maybe with a little bit of background and just say that the Humanitarian Supply Chain Lab was founded by Dr. Jarrod Goentzel. After the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, that's when he started focusing on this kind of full-time. And so we work on a lot of different things, but on the disaster side, what we like to do is combine several different fields like engineering and supply chain management and some social sciences and economics and bring it all together and try to understand what's going on with the whole supply chain systems around disasters.

- And, Lauren, what are the most current things that you're working on and considerations that you have to be making especially as we enter this season?

- Hurricane season officially starts June 1st, so we're well into hurricane season now. I will say that the greatest activity in hurricane season usually isn't until the August-September timeframe, and sometimes into October. But the work that the Humanitarian Supply Chain Lab does is part educational to sort of explain supply chains in the disaster context to emergency management audiences. That's one key piece of what we do. And we also do a lot of research to understand how supply chains adapt after disasters to meet the needs of survivors. So how does the private sector, primarily private sector supply chain actors, how do they adapt to make sure that grocery stores stay open and that people can get the goods that they need to recover from disasters? So our research centers around how that happens and how the public sector, agencies like FEMA and other agencies involved in disaster response contribute to that overall recovery of the supply chains.

- What is the quick rundown of disaster response? Like disaster response 101? What are the essential things that people are hearing about maybe in little pieces, but that would have to do with how supply chain is involved and how integral it is to the process of getting aid to places?

- My quick response to that is that, I guess I'll share two examples that are probably recent in people's minds about how supply chain impacts disaster response. One is the COVID-19 pandemic. We all remember in the early days when you couldn't get things like toilet paper, and more critically as the pandemic wore on, how supplies like masks and 95 masks and things like that weren't available. And also how grocery store shelves were under-stocked as the people operating the supply chain at various points came down with COVID-19 and the things couldn't move as they normally would for a variety of reasons. Both the people, the access in and out of different areas. I know Tim has some experience studying the freight supply chain after COVID-19 or during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how that was impacted by different restrictions of travel in and out of different places. The second example is not necessarily a natural disaster or a weather-related disaster, but the colonial pipeline ransomware attack. So in May of 2019, there was a ransomware attack on the colonial pipeline. And a ransomware attack, how it works basically is hackers send a message or something to an entity, and they essentially hold hostage a piece of your system or data that's critical in running your system. They hold something hostage and ask for ransom, a ransom payment in order to release that data or allow your system to return to normal functioning to sort of get rid of the bug that has stopped the functioning of your system. And so that was the type of attack that impacted the colonial pipeline. The colonial pipeline precautionary shut down pieces of its system, which delayed the normal delivery of fuel in some places, but not for very long. And again, as I mentioned earlier, it was well within the stock that the terminals along the pipeline had to meet normal demand. The issue arose when we saw panic buying and runs on gas at the pumps. And that was way above what normal demand would have been had there been no indication of this issue. That pipeline is part of a larger fuel supply chain and the spike in demand meant that some gas stations were out of gas. Now that was not necessarily because of a lack of supply. There were was actually adequate supply in those areas to meet normal demand, but when we saw the sort of panic buying and the spike in demand, that's when supplies ran out. So I think those are two examples that kind of illustrate for me at least the role that supply chains play oftentimes in the background of getting people the things they need in disasters, and also the impact that individual decisions like the decision for everyone to go to the gas station at the same time, and public policy decisions like the decision for there to be travel restrictions in and out of an area or curfews have on the normal operations of supply chains.

- When you don't know when you're gonna need to implement some sort of disaster relief, how do you activate all of the different parts of the supply chain and logistics so that, in aggregate, things get to where they need to be. So for instance, if the fuel gets halfway to Florida when they're having some storms, they need additional fuel, but there's no trucks to take it the rest of the way or when the trucks are there, but there's no driver to take it the rest of the way. How do all the different pieces get compiled together and get activated so that things get to where they need to be?

- It's a good question, Benjy. I mean Lauren kind of talked about this when she was talking about how people respond to disasters, and I think I'd like to take one step back and kind of say that I think when we're talking about disaster relief in the United States, it's more of making sure that the people that have needs are getting their needs met. And it's not just a specific response, but it's making sure that the private sector is working, making sure that the government can respond and do search and rescue and take care of the really important needs of the affected population, like making sure that the hospitals are up or making sure that people in nursing homes are taken care of, making sure that food and water are available for people in shelters. But when a disaster happens, a lot of what's going on is the same sorts of things that happen pre-disaster. It's just you have to deal with a lot of uncertainty and not knowing often exactly where problems are happening, where there's flooding, where roads are closed, which places have power so they can accept loads. A lot of that sort of communication stuff is part of what kind of needs to happen from either business to business or from the government to the public. And so a lot of that coordination effort is kind of key to making sure that the supply chains keep moving and moving ways that make sense.

- Is there a example of a success story in so much as there can be a success story in the wake of a disaster, but success in terms of all these pieces kind of coming together and getting things to where they need to be?

- Yeah, I mean, we've seen over time, states that respond to disasters often are getting better at this sort of work. And so I'll give you an example. During Hurricane Ian, category five storm that came ashore in Florida near Fort Myers late September 2022, caused lots of widespread damage across the state, lots of flooding, wind damage, power outages. But the state of Florida and their Emergency Operation Center, they stood up a call with the fuel wholesalers. And so these are the people that go to the terminals that have big stockpiles of fuel and then they put it in their tanker trucks and take it to gas stations, right? And so there was work done by the state to have a call with these really key supply chain partners to understand what terminals were up, where they were having trouble getting access to terminals, where they needed help being able to get fuel to retail stations, and just this little bit of coordination enabled the response to flow much smoother and to make sure that everybody knew what was happening and was on the same page. And so just shining a light on these things and having people being able to have a chance to talk to each other and to be able to ask questions that on the next call, the state can come back and answer, that's a success story, right?

- Yeah. And one thing I wanna add to what Tim said there is what makes some of that so successful is the relationships that are managed and built ahead of the disaster so that the state knows who to call, and the private sector operators on the other side know who to call at the state to facilitate that coordination. So it's building those relationships ahead of time that really allows for that coordination and that information sharing when, as Tim said, there's not a lot of... Oftentimes there's the situational awareness or the awareness of what's happening across the disaster-impacted area is spotty. Someone over here knows a little bit about what's happening there, and someone down here knows a little bit about what's happening there. But those first couple days after the disaster, there's a lot of sort of information gathering and collecting that whole picture of the situation of what's going on. And having those relationships in place ahead of time facilitates the transfer of information a lot more seamlessly because you know who to call and you know what their role is.

- With regard to that collaboration, who are the folks who are... Whether it's other academic institutions or other organizations in general, who are the folks that are doing... Working on the same types of things that you're working on?

- I mean, at the state level, there's the emergency managers at the state and the government kind of works on some of this. There's lots of industry associations that talk to the state and the federal players to make sure that their voice is heard. And some states have similar operations like that where they try to bring in the key players and maybe associations that can have a voice for some of these key players to have conversations around these things. The American Logistics Aid Network is also another group, ALAN, that does this kind of work. There's other universities that think about these things too.

- And other nonprofits that are also involved in various parts of the space.

- Yeah. And then lots of different parts of the government have different views of it, right? So if you think about the Department of Homeland Security, they care a lot about physical infrastructure and so they kind of approach things from a brick and mortar kind of point of view, right? Whereas we're thinking about things from a systemic supply chain kind of point of view, which it's not always just about where things are, but it's how they operate. So there's different people looking at this from different angles.

- Well, and you've been engaged and activated by FEMA on occasion a number of times in recent years during hurricane seasons. What does that look like when they come to you for that kind of help?

- So we are activated to support FEMA through the Supply Chain Analysis Network, which is a group of supply chain professionals, including us on the academic side. And what we provide to FEMA is almost like supply chain situational awareness. That's one of the things we provide. So our role is to give a quick lay of the land of how the private sector supply chains are functioning or not, and where government support could slot in to help improve the speed of the restoration of private sector supply chains. Because we realize that the government plays a very important role after disasters in getting services back to people, getting goods back to people, but they're a small drop in the bucket in terms of the capacity that the private sector has to move food, water, fuel. The private sector is doing that day in and day out. And so our role as part of SCAN is to understand how the government can support private sector recovery because we recognize that, that is really how most of the goods and the things and the services that people need get back to them is restoring the private sector operations. So we provide that situational awareness and just advice.

- And you've talked about bringing the public and private sectors together in this area. In general, what is that government's role in disaster response? How does it defer with what the private sector's role is and how can each operate together for this optimal response?

- The role of government is really to fill those gaps between what people's needs are and what the private sector, voluntary agencies, what the collective community is able to provide. That's the role of the government is to fill that gap and also to support where they can in restoring those private sector operations. But I think that in some areas, there's also this niche role for the government to play in the really hard to reach areas or the areas where it might not be profitable for the private sector to have a service or have an operation. That's where the government can step in and be really useful in terms of filling that gap. So it might be building homes in an island area that's been impacted by a disaster, but requires significant logistical support to get all the materials out there and to support the rebuilding of those homes. FEMA has the role of coordinating the federal government response to disasters. Then you have down the government spectrum, you have the state governments, which often have emergency management functions of their own, whether it's part of the state's Homeland Security office or another office within the state. They have an emergency management function that works with the FEMA operation. And then on down you have local governments that are really the first line in terms of an emergency response, in terms of coordinating any type of response. Any request for assistance goes up from the local government to the state government to the federal government. So anything that the local government can't handle goes to the state. And then anything that's above the state's capabilities, they make a request to the federal government. So that's generally how the government gets involved in disaster response. You have the federal coordination that supports the state and local operations. So that's sort of how it works. But in terms of what the government is responsible for, the history of emergency response in this country starts a long time ago, when we had disasters that overwhelmed individuals and individual communities' ability to respond and recover and help themselves. So groups like the Red Cross emerged to support a broader response. And then in April of 1979, FEMA was established by President Carter to be sort of the national federal coordinating body for emergency response because they recognized that the disasters were getting worse, they were impacting more people, and it was overwhelming individual communities and state's ability to respond and support themselves.

- I think what you want are resilient communities and you want communities that can respond, but there will always be disasters that overcome the capability of those communities to respond. And then if it overcomes the capability of the next sort of level of government, whether it's a state or a county, then you move on up and then there's a role for centralized groups like governments to be able to come in. And if we even step back further and we look across the world and what the UN does, when countries themselves are not able to respond to a disaster, that's when they can invite in outside groups like the UN to come in and help. And so I think there's a role for both where you need to be working to increase that local resilience and to make communities better able to take care of themselves in a disaster. But you also have to have this sort of backstop for when there are disasters that are way too big for anybody to handle.

- Well, it's interesting to me to hear about this idea that the logistics of this and the success of these responses is based on long running cultural and communal campaigns or feelings. It's not just about, oh, can we get 50 trucks to bring resources somewhere? It's about managing communities of people to be able to come together in effective ways.

- Yeah, and you see that constantly and it's something that, as I've been working in this field for 20 something years, you haven't seen a drop off in people wanting to help, right? People wanna help, people wanna come do this work. I mean, there's a reason why there's the VOAD, the National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disasters that helps to communicate all of these organizations that try to help people that want to help for disasters. You can't separate disaster response from the communities, from the people that just have this desire to open their hearts and help people who are in need.

- Well, and you have some unique resources here on the logistics side of things, at MIT, at CTL. I'm thinking of something like the CAVE Lab for instance, or the Computational Analytics, Visualization & Education Lab. Can you describe that a little bit in terms of how that might play into disaster relief?

- What we do in the CAVE Lab is we do interactive supply chain decision support applications. And by that I mean we develop applications to help supply chain professionals and maybe different stakeholders come around a common problem and take decisions. And so in a disaster, what we have done is in blue sky times, brought in different stakeholders to look at a problem and to talk about different policy levers that could be pulled, the benefits of those levers in terms of increasing throughput of aid to those in need and the private sector to talk about, well, what are the cost of those and who should be either bearing those costs or how can we have incentives to help make aid flow faster during a disaster or make goods move faster during a disaster? And so the work we do in the CAVE Lab is about having some of these policy conversations and getting people to understand the system before disaster hits. It's really important to have these conversations and to make these plans and to invest not just while it's happening, but beforehand. It's about helping to build the resilience and doing some of the preparation work, right? During its search and rescue, it's providing essential services like food, water, shelter, medical care, electricity, getting these things back up and running. After, it's about providing that financial assistance that Lauren was talking about to get people, individuals and businesses who've been affected by a disaster to get them back up on their feet. It's about providing some of these logistical supports like debris clearance, things like that, building back infrastructure like roads that have been washed out or bridges that were destroyed. And it's about providing that coordination and communication so that all these things can work the best that they... The most effectively that they can.

- A lot of what FEMA supports is the recovery of individuals and communities that don't have insurance, that maybe didn't have a grocery store before the disaster. And so need additional support in supporting the local food bank to get the food supplies back to those communities. That's why the real sort of long-term goal is increasing the resilience of all communities so that any community has the resources they need ahead of time to respond to disasters. Their individuals have homeowner's insurance or renter's insurance. They have flood insurance.

- Outside of a FEMA, what are some of the organizations or who are some of the people or institutions or services that are thinking about this stuff, or sort of leaders in this thinking? I'm thinking about organizations like ALAN, the American Logistics Aid Network, for instance.

- Yeah, so in addition to the federal government, and as Tim mentioned earlier, there are a number of voluntary agencies that are active in disasters. And one in particular that focuses on the logistics side of things is the American Logistics Aid Network. And ALAN really focuses on how to support logistics operations. So how to provide warehousing support, transportation support for moving goods from point A to point B, how to basically take advantage of assets that private sector organizations are donating in terms of warehouse space or trucks or drivers, and use those to support the overall disaster response. There can be these very specific needs, like we need to get this specific item from Puerto Rico to the mainland or from the mainland back to Puerto Rico, like after Hurricane Maria. And it may be too small for something that the government can provide, but too big for something that another agency can provide. And ALAN has the ability to work through its network and find that kind of niche logistics support that's needed.

- I don't wanna call any out 'cause there's just so many, right? They all come together to help work during the disaster and they take different roles, whether it's helping with mass care or if it's feeding or lots of different kinds of ways that they involve themselves.

- When you're dealing on every day with logistics, surrounding things that have a stress of the urgency, like a disaster, what gets you out of bed in the morning? What keeps you running?

- What gets me out of bed in the morning is the ability to think creatively to solve problems that could ultimately help better the experience of a disaster survivor on their worst day. It's really for me about how do I use the skills and the knowledge that I have to help people. That's what gets me out of bed in the morning.

- Yeah, and I think like Lauren, I like to solve problems. The challenge of answering questions that are hard is really interesting and working on humanitarian logistics is complex, right? There's lots of challenges to overcome. And then on top of that, it's just so crucial that anything we can do to help somebody that's in need, to treat them with dignity and respect when, like Lauren said, they're at their worst or they're in their most need, then it makes for a good day. I guess the other thing that's really nice is coming to work with the people that I work with is really nice. You're surrounded by a talented, really smart, dedicated people that are passionate about trying to help others and it's really great to come to work and work with them.

- What's something that you're wishing I'm asking that I haven't yet?

- So after Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria, in 2017, the lab was engaged in a national academy study to provide recommendations for strengthening supply chain resilience. And we often turn back to those in disasters that continue to happen, as they continue to happen, and they remain relevant. So I think I'll just touch on them briefly here because I think they're useful to understand. So the first is shifting the focus from pushing relief supplies to restoring regular supply chains as soon as possible. And we've talked about that throughout this discussion about it really being important to restore those private sector supply chains, those normal supply chains as fast as possible, because while the government has a role in pushing that initial relief supplies to fill that gap when the private sector may not be able to operate as they normally would, getting those back up is really important. The second is strengthening the understanding on the emergency management side of their local supply chain. So do you know as an emergency manager where your closest fuel terminal is and how the fuel gets from that terminal to the retail stations in your area? So really understanding those local dynamics because that's where if there are impacts in a disaster, that's the first place they're gonna show up in your community and the first place they're gonna be an issue potentially. The third is improving information sharing and coordination across public and private. And we talked about this a little earlier in terms of how do you establish those communication lines ahead of time? And like Tim said, with the CAVE Lab, that's a great example of how you practice that information sharing. Okay, you're in the CAVE Lab, you're simulating a disaster, what are you gonna do? What lever are you gonna pull, public sector,? What does that mean for you, private sector? Oh, if you pull this lever, it actually makes my job harder. So maybe don't pull that, then maybe wait or maybe pull it earlier. And then the fourth recommendation was to provide training to emergency managers on supply chain dynamics. So this kind of relates to the second one about strengthening understanding of the supply chains, but really building that understanding on the emergency management side of supply chain dynamics. How do bottlenecks emerge? What do you do if a bottleneck emerges? How do you think about relaxing or what you can do to ease that bottleneck to make sure that flow continues to move. So really, that training is, I think I mentioned it very early on, is part of our role in the lab is that education piece and educating the emergency management community both domestically and internationally around supply chain dynamics and how it works and what it means in a response.

- Yeah. And we do that through an in-person class here at MIT for master's students. And we're about to launch a class on edX in humanitarian logistics that anyone can sign up for. And it's free to take the class and there's a slight fee if you want to get a certificate out of it.

- Well, thank you again for joining us here today on Supply Chain Frontiers, brought to you by the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics, celebrating its 50th year. Again, I'm Benjy Kantor. Today I've been joined by research engineer, Tim Russell, and research associate, Lauren Finegan, both of the Center's Humanitarian Supply Chain Lab. You can find more about that lab at humanitarian.mit.edu. Tim and Lauren, thank you so much for joining us today. In part two, I'm gonna relinquish my hosting duties to both Lauren and Tim as they speak with Kathy Fulton of the American Logistics Aid Network, the executive director. Thank you so much.

- Thanks, Benjy.

- Thanks, Benjy.

- All right, everyone, thank you for listening. I hope you've enjoyed this edition of MIT Supply Chain Frontiers. My name is Arthur Grau, communications officer for the center. And I invite you to visit us anytime at ctl.mit.edu, or search for MIT Supply Chain Frontiers on your favorite listening platform. Until next time.