To view this site you need Adobe Flash Player and your browser must allow javaScripts. Go here to get the latest Flash Player. A BETTER WAY OF BUYING and pounding waves and within a day caused massive power, phone and critical system outages statewide, which left close to 4 million people without power and communications for several days and—for hundreds of thousands—weeks afterward. Throughout the state, but especially in Florida’s southeastern counties of Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade, people scrambled in near panic to get hold of fast-dwindling supplies of food, water, ice and building supplies. For several days after the storm some emergency distribution centers were not operational and many of those that had opened were running out of supplies. Emergency supplies ran out at nine of Miami-Dade County’s 11 distribution centers, prompting citizen frustration and anger. Three days after the storm, one citizen waiting in a line at a Sam’s Club gas station in Miami spoke for many Floridians when she complained to the Associated Press: “This is like the Third World. We live in a state where we suffer from these storms every year. Where is the planning?” W. Craig Fugate, then director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management and today head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), acknowledged in the storm’s aftermath that preparedness had come up short. “We did not meet expectations,” he said at a press conference in the state capitol at Tallahassee. “We pushed as much as we could in a rapidly moving environment. No excuses. We’re going to work hard to make it better.” Fugate’s words were prophetic. The logistics bottlenecks and failures dramatized by Wilma, Cherry recalled, sparked a systemwide rethinking of the state’s approach to emergency procurement and logistics preparation. Reforming the procurement process “After Wilma,” Cherry recalled, “state leaders from Director Fugate to the state legislature directed a laser-like focus on troubleshooting how we went about the processes of emergency supply preparations and procurement and revamping how the procurement process and distribution logistics could be streamlined.” The lynchpins of the new approach, Cherry explained, were radical reform of the procurement contracting process and tighter statewide coordination of the functions of inventory auditing, management and control, logistics and distribution. The key to making a new system work, Cherry said, was focus on a procurement and contracting process that, unlike the previous system, was really proactive. “Traditionally,” said Cherry, “the approach was that we’d have a number of small warehouses, generally uncoordinated and fragmented throughout the state. Each of them would handle supply procurement and vendor relations separately, using different benchmarks and processes.” In place of this piecemeal approach, the state mandated that all supplier contracts for emergency supplies be pre-negotiated ahead of time, with emergency responsibilities explicitly spelled out. As Cherry described it, “Whenever a vendor responds to a request for proposal, by law they need to agree to guarantee provision of a particular amount of a certain resource within X amount of time specified in advance. In addition, the supplier must commit to having a regularly replenished stock of emergency supplies on hand at the center at all times. What that means is that, say, we have a water supplier who keeps 72 hours of emergency water supply. It becomes his responsibility to check inventory on that water every 30 days and take out any stock that’s passed its expiration date and replenish it with fresh water, at no cost to the state.” Of course, it’s one thing to sign a contract, another to demonstrate that these commitments can be kept in the heat of a crisis. To ensure vendor readiness, Florida state’s logistics Director Chuck Hagen, according to Cherry, uses frequent live drills to test the vendors’ capabilities in what he calls “no-notice thunderbolts.” “It’s one thing to have a vendor say he can respond in an immediate ‘just in time’ manner to an emergency. It’s another to have him prove it with no notice,” said Cherry. Pre-positioning assets As an additional move to smarten hurricane preparation, the state legislature in 36 June 2009 | Homeland Security Today Magazine This month’s issue is now available online at…