Detection the Seriousness of Pandemics by Supply Chain Disruptions

One of the topics that most interests me is early detection of disaster issues by watching changes that occur in the supply chain.

Most of us assume that the government has huge stockpiles of supplies, and then when a disaster occurs, then all they have to do is move the supplies from the delivery area to the needed area. If you think about it, then you know that is not true. One could merely look back to Hurricane Sandy and see that it took a long time, weeks sometimes for even water to be delivered.

Why does that happen? We know that there are some reserves. Why are those not deployed to the disaster zones?

The most likely answer is that a buffer is needed for government first responders. Whomever they send ...will need water themselves. They know approximately how many first responders to send in a general first wave but not how many refugees are affected.

It would be impossible to guess how much bottled water would be needed because the nature of a disaster is that we don't know where it will occur. We could anticipate how much water is needed, but then where would we store it so that it could reasonably get to the refugees in time?

While city and county utilities in local government produce water, the Federal government doesn't that much, and they don't have bottling facilities. The Department of Defense might produce some bottled water, but they also contract for it, and this is what will probably happen in a disaster like a pandemic.

A contract is listed on FedBizOps [link to www.fbo.gov (secure)] and then those who are registered and possess an ID can bid on those contracts, and so sometimes things get noticed by folks like GLPers (like a lot of MREs) and then they put up a topic. This is likely one very good way to detect a ramping up of needed supplies in order to assist anticipated refugees in a zone.

Because a pandemic is by definition everywhere, you can expect not only shortages but worse, companies, state, and federal organizations are competing for fast delivery of supplies. That will cause supply chain disruptions. Because the supplies have to be moved most likely by trucking, and truckers could get sick like anyone or have issues with sick family members or be freaking out about contagion since they're moving into a hot zone, then expect issues with supply chain disruptions too.

Because certain things like water purification chemicals could run low for city utilities, that could be a worse case scenario. This is why if things get bad, you need to prioritize water and or your own pool shock so you can improve the water quality coming in.