Transportation

Transportation is key to disaster preparedness, and is one of the major obstacles to disaster response. Evacuation routes and disaster response routes are critical to preparedness plans, particularly in conjunction with the coordination of air and water transit. Most weather disasters will impact both. Debris, standing water, or fire may block routes and need to be cleared before the routes can be used, but need the routes to be used to bring in the personnel to clear them. This delays the recovery process, adds to equipment and labor costs, and in many cases may require the use of helicopters to bring in personnel to prepare other transit routes, clear runways, or repair ports. Transportation hazards also add to the human cost of the disaster when the injured are unable to reach medical care or rescue workers are unable to get to the scene.

These transportation snares can be either brief, resolved within hours, or ongoing logistics challenges. The Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and the Haiti earthquake in 2010 presented transportation problems complicated enough to inspire the reexamination of the logistics of disaster relief, and reinforced the need for highly granular plans that could be adjusted based on transit route availability and shifting conditions—such as when cleared routes become clogged with traffic, ongoing weather leads to mudslides, or earthquake aftershocks cause further damage or debris. Even less severe conditions require establishing a distribution network identifying supply collection and delivery points, and the supply chain may include many steps. Such networks may be subject to security concerns if the disaster has led to looting, rioting, or other social problems. In every major disaster, there is the chance for different response segments interfering with each other, for supply convoys blocking routes for emergency personnel, or for clean-up crews and rescue crews becoming mutually underfoot. Anything that delays response efforts, can contribute to panic and disorder, especially when communication is impaired and supply shortages increase the chances of a developing black market, putting disaster responders in danger as they may be intercepted and robbed.

Dealing with transportation problems during a natural disaster is especially a concern in the developing world, where infrastructure may not be well established to begin with, and where a greater proportion of the settlement may be rural. This means they are farther from airports and ports, have a less stable communications infrastructure, have fewer highways and wide roads to accommodate supply trucks, and have medical services that are generally less sophisticated and have lower capacity. Because earthquake frequency has remained more or less constant in the last two decades, while flooding, hurricanes, and tropical storms have increased, hurricane-prone parts of the world are disproportionately affected by natural disasters, and many of them lie outside of the developed world. Although the developing world bears about the same economic cost [Page 690]of natural catastrophes as the developed world, the per-capita cost relative to GDP is significantly higher in the developing world. One of the key traits of an impoverished country is its lack of infrastructure, as determined by the standards of the developed world. A number of humanitarian organizations distribute satellite phones to their disaster response personnel, for instance, not simply because local communications infrastructure may be damaged, but also because cellular coverage is often spotty and less stable to begin with. The maintenance of transportation infrastructure like roads, highways, airports, air traffic control towers, and ports is often beyond the means of poorer countries, neglected in favor of more pressing issues such as food, medicine, and industrial concerns. When this infrastructure is destroyed by natural disasters, the impact is a severe blow on a developing country, which will often lack the means to repair it—especially in rural areas, where road repair equipment may simply not be available.

...