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Logistics Makes for Successful Emergency Response Team Deployment

My academic instruction and my own continued readings reinforce the premise that logistics will make or break an emergency response effort. My experience and what I hear from other deployed teams strengthens my belief in the absolute importance of logistical considerations. The debrief session from one of our emergency response teams’ deployment for the G8 Summit drilled home the point repeatedly.

The team’s deployment went smoothly. In fact, they were testing out their recently modularized equipment and the setup and teardown went so smoothly that both were completed ahead of schedule. The 3-day around-the-clock deployment went without a hitch. Although the team was not placed under heavy stress on this deployment, since nothing much happened up in Huntsville during the G8 Summit, it was nonetheless a good test of the team’s logistical capabilities to deploy and operate smoothly.

Lessons from the deployment include the following:

• Ensuring a continuous and uninterrupted fuel supply for the power generators takes more attention and effort than you might think
• Ensuring sufficient generator capacity is crucial – you have to calculate it out before your deployment and build in a sufficient safety margin in case your generator is outputting below spec or you end up using more equipment simultaneously than planned
• Hand hygiene is an often-overlooked but critical consideration – gastrointestinal issues can easily crop up around temporary camps unless you make sure everyone keeps their hands clean, and putting up hand sanitizer pump stations all over the place is a great thing to do
• Potable water is always critical, and all the more so during a hot summer deployment
• Equipment needs to be sufficiently “weatherized” – the team experienced 50-60kph wind gusts during the deployment and were glad their new tents were anchored well and adequately weatherized, which in the past was not always the case
• Feed your people good quality food – it’s important for morale, and it’s necessary in order to keep your people running at peak performance for an extended period of time
• Ensure sufficient lighting – when you have equipment and power cables going everywhere through your camp, shadows cast by your tents and equipment are health & safety hazards
• Ensure proper security fencing & guards around the camp to enforce perimeter security

The biggest lessons were actually the hand safety, generator capacity and lighting.

At other camps set up by other organizations, there were some gastrointestinal issues that may have been due to hand hygiene. At a high-profile international event many years ago, site security was at risk due to food poisoning due to poor food safety. People have to eat, and you know from your own experiences as a tourist that if you eat something that isn’t clean or that has been sitting out for too long that you aren’t going to be in any condition to do a serious job for at least a half day. Your people can be taken out of commission by something as simple as hand hygiene or food safety. This specific team’s deployment, however, went totally smoothly and part of that was due to the attention paid to hand hygiene.

Generator capacity is an area where more is better than not enough. The team learned that its one generator was sufficient for this deployment but did not give them a sufficient safety margin in terms of power availability. They will be procuring a second generator and bringing it along to future deployments. Note, however, that this increases load on your logistics team to keep a continuous, uninterrupted supply of fuel coming in.

Finally, lighting was a revelation to the team. It had brought along its standard lighting setup which in the past had always been “sufficient.” However, for this deployment they borrowed additional lighting equipment from an urban search & rescue team and, apparently, it was like night and day. Having more and better lighting kept the camp safer and would have enabled the team to operate at the same tempo & intensity in the middle of the night as during the middle of the day.

Think about any of the times you have had emergency deployments or had to activate emergency response plans. I’m willing to bet that logistics will have played a role in many cases, either clearly enabling a successful outcome or clearly causing many needless troubles or challenges.

When you are putting together emergency response plans or business continuity plans, give serious thought to your logistics. Think through the practical elements of what it takes to get the job done and what it takes to keep your people safe and at their best.

Logistics can, very literally, make or break you.