In coming days, we’ll see many calls for providing financial support to help the victims of Hurricane Florence. While this support is vital, often overlooked are the efforts needed to invest in and reduce the effects of future disasters. Only 1 percent of international aid is spent on mitigating the impact of future disasters, according to United Nations statistics.
Alfonso Pedraza-Martinez, associate professor of operations and decision technologies in the Indiana University Kelley School of Business, and a Grainger Faculty Fellow, said also vital are preparedness efforts and mitigating the damage of future events.
“Long-term mitigation strategies like facility fortification are very important but sometimes are overlooked. If you don’t have an immediate risk of a disaster, you tend to discount that risk in the future. You feel lucky and think that may not happen,” he said.
In new research, Pedraza-Martinez and two colleagues studied the impact of disaster mitigation (facility fortification) on preparedness (prepositioning aid items) and response (rapid aid distribution). Using real data from the hurricane-prone southeastern United States, they compared the case of fortified facilities and unfortified facilities for different degrees of decentralization (number of inventory-holding facilities).
“You need those long-term investments in fortifying your facilities if you want a very fast disaster response,” said Pedraza-Martinez, who also is president of the College of Humanitarian Operations and Crisis Management at the Production and Operations Management Society.
Unlike with commercial settings, they found that controlled decentralization minimizes total prepositioned inventory in disaster settings. They also found that although disaster mitigation does not reduce the total prepositioned inventory needed for disaster response, it reduces the required number of inventory-holding facilities for aid distribution.
“You want to be close to people, but not excessively close,” Pedraza-Martinez said. Positioning relief supplies within high-risk areas often leads to their being lost when disaster hits, impacting response.
Another recommendation, which is quite important for Caribbean island countries with critical budget issues, is the need to invest in fortified facilities. “If you don’t fortify at least some facilities that cover your inventory, you should forget about timely disaster response,” he said. “The likelihood that you’d lose your entire inventory is very high.”
Pedraza-Martinez’s award-winning research on humanitarian operations management has informed the practice of logistics at the Red Cross Movement, World Food Programme and World Vision International.
He can be reached at 812-855-6227 or [email protected].
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