popular logistics

Jake Hooker ¹ in his “Memo From Beijing/Quake Revealed Deficiencies of China’s Military,” has done an impressive job showing planning and preparation failures on the part of the Chinese - or, in the best of all possible worlds, the beginning of the “lessons learned” process for China’s disaster planners. ²

“In order to save people buried under rubble, many soldiers’ hands were cut and bloodied, and they kept their hands moving,” Hu Changming, a Defense Ministry spokesman, said at news conference in May.

After the May earthquake in southwestern Sichuan Province, China sent about 130,000 troops from the army, navy, air force and the Second Artillery Corps scrambling into the mountains in China’s broadest deployment of its armed forces since it fought a border war with Vietnam in 1979.

It was a gritty, hands-on effort, unfolding under the clear view of the public and the news media, and it offered analysts the best chance to assess the performance of the People’s Liberation Army in a crisis since the nation’s rising economy started pumping tens of billions of dollars into the military. It got good marks for public relations domestically, but the effort left some veteran P.L.A.-watchers underwhelmed.

James C. Mulvenon, a specialist on the Chinese military at the Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis, a government contractor in Washington that performs classified analyses on overseas military programs, said the earthquake showed the army’s best and worst sides. It mobilized quickly, but the troops were unprepared to save lives in the first 72 hours, when thousands were buried under toppled masonry and every minute mattered.

“You basically had a bunch of guys humping through the mountains on foot and digging out people with their hands,” Mr. Mulvenon said. “It was not a stellar example of a modern military.”

In an online forum hosted by the state-run People’s Daily, Zhang Zhaozhong, a prominent defense analyst, said that specialized units like the Marine Corps, the 38th Army Corps of Engineers and the engineering division of the Second Artillery Corps understood how to rescue survivors from beneath collapsed buildings. But he acknowledged that the overwhelming majority of the deployed forces, ordinary combat troops, had little if any rescue training. The army had about 100 helicopters ferrying food, supplies and medical teams into the remote mountain areas and rescuing the injured, said Dennis J. Blasko, a former American Army attaché in Beijing. “The management of aircraft and helicopters operating in the area is probably the largest extended operation of its kind the P.L.A. has ever conducted,” he said.

But Mr. Blasko and other experts said that because the military did not have heavy-lift helicopters, vital equipment like excavators and cranes had to be brought in on roads obstructed by landslides, slowing the pace of the rescue operations.

Shen Dingli, a leading security expert at Fudan University in Shanghai, said the military’s response did not reflect well on the military’s preparedness for a potential war with, say, Taiwan, the independently governed island that China claims as its sovereign territory. China’s air force deployed 6,500 paratroopers to Sichuan, but only 15 ended up dropping into the disaster zone, military officials said, because of bad weather and forbidding mountain terrain. Mr. Shen called the effort too little and too late.

“The air force should have been able to get troops into Wenchuan in two hours,” he said, referring to a county near the quake’s epicenter. “It took 44 hours. If it took them 10 hours, that’s understandable. But 44 hours is shameful.”

Allan Behm, a former official in Australia’s Defense Ministry, said the Chinese military was evidently still focused on conventional warfare rather than engineering skills. In spite of its efforts to modernize, Mr. Behm said, “the P.L.A. is still built on the idea of bringing hundreds of thousands of troops into the battle area.”

We urge our readers to read Hooker’s entire piece - and we’d like to hear more about these events. However, we take the following to be the critical points (from the perspective of the disaster-preparedness community):

• Generators - and emergency lighting
• extrication equipment, from specialized cutting tools to shovels
• heavy-lift helicopters
• Training: if the PLA are the designated first responders in disasters, then it appears that their training has to be expanded beyond infantry skills;
• Transportation: heavy-lift helicopters to move heavy equipment in, and sufficient heli and other resources to move responders past blocked roads. This last - getting responders and gear in place - may be a deficiency in planning and coordination, a shortage of helicopters and off-road vehicles, or a combination of both.
• Government action to avoid transparency and resultant embarassment.

This last is critical. The Chinese have already internalized government willingness to suppress embarassing information. From Mr. Hooker’s piece:

So far, the official death toll is almost 70,000. One Chinese reporter, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals, gave an indication of how many more might have been saved.

He said he traveled overland with a group of P.L.A. soldiers to the town of Yingxiu, near the earthquake’s epicenter. He said that they got there at dusk, about 48 hours after the quake had hit, and that thousands of victims remained buried under collapsed buildings, including more than 200 students at the local elementary school.

Eight hundred injured people had been brought to a clearing, waiting to be evacuated by helicopter. But by noon the next day, only about 10 had been evacuated by air, the reporter said. Many died there in the clearing, waiting to be rescued.

The town had only one electrical generator, and the troops had no power tools. At the Yingxiu Primary School, the soldiers dug with their hands. Some children could be heard singing under the rubble, the reporter said, presumably to keep their spirits up.

A day later, he said, the singing stopped.

Last, we note that none of these shortages or problems are unique to China - or absent in the United States, other than the regular use of state violence to suppress journalists, lawyers and others who embarass the government. But the planning and preparedness deficiencies are present in the United States. Examples of each can easily be found in accounts of the Katrina episode.³ China’s failures should be instructional in the United States rather than cause for complacency.

1. The Times doesn’t link to Mr. Hooker’s work via his byline, as it usually does; we think this may denote that the byline belongs to a freelancer. In any case, it’s worth noting that he’s been nominated for the Pulitzer three or four times, depending on whether it counts when one’s name isn’t in the byline as such, and received it for one of those nominations, all for reporting from/about China. In 2008, with Walt Bogdanich for their series about tainted medicines and medicinal chemicals (nominated in two categories); “Chinese Chemicals Flow Unchecked to Market,” from the same series [↩]
2. See Donahue and Tuohy, Lessons We Don’t Learn, published in Homeland Security Affairs, a journal published by the Naval Postgraduate School Center for Homeland Defense and Security. [↩]
3. See, e.g., various Katrina resources at the NPS Center for Hastily Formed Networks; Douglas Brinkley’s The Great Deluge; Michael Eric Dyson’s Come Hell or High Water; and Christopher Cooper’s Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security. [↩]

Mapz: a gis librarian  - a mysterious and anonymous GIS librarian, to boot - has a post which may well answer the question - what do underfunded and non-funded community-based groups do about their GIS needs.

In this post,  My Powerful Geospatial Suite of Free GIS, Mr. Mapz has a pretty impressive list of applications, about which he says:

These are the freely available applications and services that make up my own personal free GIS. Individually, many freely available applications do not of themselves constitute a full geographic information system, but when these are all pulled together within one suite of tools…Well, it is remarkable what someone can do without spending a cent. (And without needing to spend an enormous amount of time developing your own applications out of open source components or needing to learn, or install, complex applications, such as GRASS GIS.)

- snip -

For a more comprehensive freeware software list, see FreeGIS.org.

Mapz also points to a more exhaustive list of resources of desktop GIS applications, including not-free software, at this link on Very Spatial.

The GIS/map piece of the planning function is, without question, critical. There are two barriers, I think - cost and learning curve - that prevent community-based groups from doing more. This is especially true in communities where local government isn’t supporting community planning and response: it’s hard to get to thinking about a steep learning curve when you’re worried that your municipality is slacking on basic safety issues and you’re trying to persuade your neighbors to buy flashlights.

Via Pruned: At the University of California San Diego, (UCSD) the NEES program (Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation ) has built a very large “shake table.” From NEES/UCSD:

[Show as slideshow]

The UCSD LHP Outdoor Shake Table is being developed at the Field Station at Camp Elliott, a site located 15km away from the main UCSD campus. The shake table, acting in combination with equipment and facilities separately funded by the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), which include a large laminar soil shear box and two refillable soil pits, will result in a one-of-a-kind worldwide seismic testing facility.

Hospitals have the Joint Commission on Accreditation on Hospital Organizations; and there are many othes that certify other things: MAGNET certification, which means that the nurses are well-cared for, well-trained and well-equipped (inside tip: if nurse moral is bad - that’s not a hospital you want to be in.

NB: as of this writing, the JCAHO (Joint Commission) website is entirely down. Not even a 404 error. 

So who sets standards for evaluating preparedness? Nobody. But, as the NIUSR has pointed out -last year, Reader’s Digest took a shot. From the NIUSR Blog:

Jamie Imus, writing on the NIUSR blog, makes this case:

How is Reader’s Digest qualified to measure the preparedness of our urban areas?

The answer is simple. They aren’t, but no one else was doing it, so they took it upon themselves.

This reveals three opportunities for NIUSR:

1. Support RD for their initiative and recognition of the issues, and use this as an opportunity to critically review their work, offer our expertise, endorse the study (if appropriate) and potentially join them in this effort (they may want us to lead, as experts).
2. RD is about to give this issue a spotlight and I think NIUSR should take advantage of that to talk about our “imperatives” and our progress, to date.
3. Standards! What are they? Where are they? RD suggests that they don’t exist, so they did their best to come up with some. This is a gap that NIUSR needs to fill, until someone with more authority, expertise or resources wants to fill it.

Not only is this critical for the general public - and for professionals - but exceptionally important for the planners in citizen-response groups and NGO’s - especially those with less money - because accurately knowing weaknesses and strengths will make for better resource-allocation decisions.

BrainMurmurs, have released a project management tool called Mentat, which looks interesting. Has a free individual version, two inexpensive paid versions. Of course - our first thought is whether the team version lends itself to use by emergency response teams, SARs, or 3Steps groups. No word on whether they’ve got  a different price structure for nonprofits.

The people behind Brain Murmurs - “Guerrilla computing in the mountains of Seattle”  -  have a bunch of impressive achievements behind them. Mentat may be worth a try.

WMX has an appropriate response to what’s likely to be the latest edition of “security theatre” - this year’s TOPOFF exercise.

Our “premier terrorism preparedness exercise” is based on a dirty bomb threat?  And has been based on a dirty bomb threat for the last 8 years?

I’m only halfway kidding.  The United States has a lot of problems that, while they might not look as big as a “dirty bomb” going off, are a bit more pressing.  Case in point: 11 September was not a radiological, chemical or biological attack.

Future devastating attacks will be “black swans” (as John Robb calls them in Brave New War), attacks coming out of left field that are cheap and unexpected and targeted at infrastructure.  Why were the attacks of 11 September genius?  Hijackings had been around for decades by that point.  Dealing with them had become fairly old hat.

They were brilliant because they connected two things that people hadn’t connected before.  Who thinks of turning an airplane into a guided missile?  No one- until someone with great synthesis skills started turning over airplanes in their head.

The attacks on the Trade Center probably caused less casualties than a radiological attack would.  Why was that message chosen then?  Because it made people afraid to fly.  Because no one was thinking about defending against that kind of attack.  We’ve been preparing to respond to radiological emergencies for better than thirty years.

Wargaming programs like TOPOFF would be better off confronting “top officials” and first responders with something that they’ve never seen before.  Hit them with something like an attack on a power plant, or an oil refinery, or a bridge.  Attack the infrastructure.  This isn’t a new idea- it’s been around since John Warden’s The Air Campaign and we used it to toss Iraq in DESERT STORM.  Why do we assume that our enemies won’t be that smart?

WingmanX’s post here.

I’ll add that - as someone involved at the local level - in a city in which the Fire and Police departments didn’t do serious drills between the 1993 and 2001 WTC attacks - we need to spend money and energy on working-level drills. 

Or

• another example from Irwin Redlener - hospital evacuations - logistically complex - and under some circumstances, absolutely critical;
• evacuations of other institutions. For instance - the world’s largest prison - Riker’s Island - isn’t too far above sea level. In a flood, are we going to let prisoners drown?
• Attacks on pipelines - or other underground infrastructure

I think WingmanX may have stumbled across the bureaucratic tripwire of this rule: if we acknowledge a problem, we then must take responsibility for solving it.

You’ve put out a call for volunteers for your brand-new local emergency response organization. It’s so new that you don’t even have a name yet.Follow past the jump for more details and the prizes.

This is a post-Katrina take on why the system didn’t work - so it’s not new - but no less relevant - from a blog, Marginal Revolution, which we’ve only recently discovered.

Link to post here.

From Irwin Redlener’s Americans at Risk:

Even if the nation’s intelligence capacity is substantially strengthened and homeland security better assured, these systems will never be perfect. An American city could conceivably experience the nightmare of a nuclear detonation. The essential point is that the quality and extent of survival and recovery, even from a nuclear bomb, are affected by the success of our preparedness and mitigation programs.

The current presidential administration is, of course, now well-known for its argument that it “didn’t want the smoking gun to become a mushroom cloud.” Implicit - by omission - was that the strategy of pre-empting the (hypothetical or fictional) threat of nuclear attack by Iraq would so likely to succeed that it wasn’t necessary to take steps to mitigate or prepare for the effects of a nuclear attack.