Atlanta plays pivotal relief role with quake victims: Logistics

As the world scrambles to help Haiti, businesses and organizations in Atlanta are concerning themselves with some key, if mundane, relief items, namely: buckets, underwear and biscuits.

Home Depot had truckloads of 3 1/2-gallon buckets to donate, only to discover they weren’t needed.

Habitat for Humanity International needed 5-gallon buckets to assemble its “shelter kits” containing hammers, nails, tarps and rope.

But it turned out the smaller buckets were needed. Relief agency CARE says they are perfect for disaster victims, especially women, to carry water.

UPS, meanwhile, is working to get eight truckloads of underwear from Salt Lake City to Miami, and a load of high-energy biscuits from Norway to the Dominican Republic. The route? Norway to Cologne, Germany, to Louisville, Ky., to Miami to Santo Domingo, where CARE has arranged for trucks to drive them into Haiti.

The logistical world of emergency relief —- which has a large footprint in Atlanta —- is being tested as in few other natural disasters. Desperately needed supplies of food, water and medicine are being slowed by torn roads, inadequate security and distribution bottlenecks.

“The general public doesn’t realize how complicated logistics are in a disaster,” said Julie Swann, co-director of Georgia Tech’s Center for Health and Humanitarian Logistics. Sudden floods of supplies can worsen emergencies. “It’s not good for the system for everyone to send everything as fast as they can.”

A logistical nexus

Atlanta, long a center for commerce and distribution, is now a center for relief, Swann said. “Very few places have this critical mass of organizations.”

Aid organizations have come to Atlanta for the same reasons so many businesses have: It’s easier here to move goods and services in a hurry.

Atlanta may have more logistics experts than any other city and the “just-in-time” shipping methods that helped turn Home Depot and UPS into giants also benefit organizations like CARE USA and Habitat for Humanity. In times of emergency, relief agencies use many of the established supply lines and systems.

Dr. Scott F. Dowell, director of Global Disease Detection and Emergency Response at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was headed to Haiti this weekend to help set up systems to prevent the spread of disease in upcoming months. Nearly 200 CDC employees are involved in the Haiti effort.

“We are at an advantage because Atlanta is a transportation hub,” said Dowell, who expects dozens of CDC officials to filter in and out of the ravaged country in upcoming months. Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, the world’s busiest, gives the CDC and relief agencies “an agility” to react in crisis.

Atlanta-based CARE USA, with 140 workers in Haiti, is focusing on providing clean water to prevent outbreaks of diarrhea and other ailments.

Rigoberto Giron, vice president of strategic initiatives of CARE, has helped make sure water from Coca-Cola plants in the Dominican Republic, purification tablets from Panama, water containers already in Haiti and Norwegian energy biscuits get to the right places in time.

“We have a robust partnership with UPS,” he said. “They have allowed us access to their infrastructure. We are creating a supply chain for support.”

‘Worst-case scenario’

On Thursday, a UPS flight to Port-au-Prince brought tents, blankets and first-aid kits. UPS spokeswoman Ronna Branch said 100 company workers have been engaged in the Haiti effort, taking their lead from other agencies.

“We have to work with the agencies,” she said. “We’re not disaster relief experts; we’re logistics experts. They determine … what items need to get to what place and we decide what’s the most efficient way to get there.”

About 140 relief flights a day are getting into Port-au-Prince, CNN has reported, up from 25 a day right after the quake.

CARE’s headquarters, which moved to Atlanta from New York in the early 1990s, manages 40 of the 70 countries where the agency works. Giron compared the devastation and the problems in Haiti to that of the 2004 tsunami in Asia.

“The issue here is [both the devastation and population] is so concentrated,” Giron said. “It’s a worst-case scenario.”

In Haiti, the agency must depend on trucks driving four hours on routes that used to take 30 minutes. Or they must fly supplies into Santo Domingo, which adds another day.

Home Depot played a big role after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, but responding to Haiti has been much harder. Haiti is an island, the infrastructure is in terrible shape and the company has no stores there.

The company’s “rapid deployment centers” are used during hurricanes, wildfires and tornados to make sure the right building supplies arrive where they are needed.

“We’re really good at determining where our merchandise is, where it needs to be and the getting it there,” said Kelly Caffarelli, president of the Home Depot Foundation, the company’s philanthropic arm.

Playing matchmaker

During this crisis, Home Depot is a matchmaker between the company’s 5,000 suppliers and a handful of large relief agencies, like the Red Cross or Habitat for Humanity. “We don’t have time to vet nonprofits we don’t already have relations with,” she said. Popular supplies have been post-hole diggers, chain saws, tarps and even hand sanitizer.

Last week, the foundation got a call: Former President Bill Clinton was flying to Haiti and “he’d sure like to bring some generators,” Caffarelli recalled. Later, a supplier had “two trucks of generators it wanted to donate but didn’t know who to donate to,” she said. “We’re talking to Red Cross about where they need to be.”

While response to the Haitian crisis has been rapid, too much generosity can overload the system. Or be ill-timed.

“We all want to act and act now,” she said. “But sometimes the better course is to wait and do things strategically. I remember a three-story-high pile of donations of clothes and shoes [in a Gulf Coast town after Katrina] lying in the rain.”

But it’s sometimes hard for agencies to get donors to sustain interest over the long haul, said Swann, the Georgia Tech professor. And while many relief organizations would like to upgrade their logistical and administrative systems, they can get penalized in the public eye.

“Everyone wants their money to go to helping right away,” she said. Relief organizations “are measured on what they are doing right away. [Because of this] they cannot invest in their systems to make it better tomorrow. Ultimately, they could reach more people.”

Planning on staying

Habitat for Humanity International is assembling its “shelter kits” to help victims repair their lives, said Kip Scheidler, the agency’s director of global disasters. “It’s so important for their mental health to be involved in their own rebuilding.”

Habitat, which began in Americus, operates in nearly 90 countries. An estimated 200,000 homes in Haiti are heavily damaged or destroyed, Scheidler said. Within a few months, Habitat will start building “core houses,” which become footprints for permanent homes. Each has a concrete floor, concrete block at base, temporary material walls, a permanent material roof and a water-sanitation unit, he said.

The effort will begin outside Port-au-Prince, where there is more room, less debris and it is clearer who owns the land. “The ad hoc construction and the density and compact nature of Port-au-Prince will make [rebuilding] more difficult,” Scheidler said. “The center of Port-au-Prince will take time.”

But they will be there, he said.

Haitians in metro Atlanta

People of Haitian ancestry:

Gwinnett County 4,253

Cobb County

3,536

Fulton County

1,391

DeKalb County

1,359

Metro Atlanta total 17,158

Source: 2008 American Community Survey