Flu pandemic and its potential affect on logistics
May 5, 2009 by 3plwire
Filed under Misc Logistics
I just read a pretty interesting article from IEEE spectrum about the affect a global pandemic could have on the U.S. freight rail networks and ports. Obviously with the recent outbreak of the swine flu (H1N1), I have been wondering what kind of affect a flu pandemic (or for that matter, any broad catastrophe) would have on global trade.
This particular article focuses on the potential difficulties that both the rail system and ports would encounter and it was determined that the rail system would bear the brunt of the issues mainly due to available resources and capacity.
Systems engineers at Cornell University and Sandia National Laboratories analyzed the impact of influenza at three levels of severity. In the midlevel scenario, in which absenteeism peaks at 13.6 percent during an outbreak, the effective capacity of the United States’ 18 major rail yards is cut by 10 percent. That might not seem like much, but there is so little spare capacity in the rail system that such a pandemic would lead to widespread problems lasting six to eight weeks.?
“We have a very brittle system already in rail,” says Linda K. Nozick, a professor of systems engineering at Cornell University, who was part of the team that performed the simulation. The main problem is with the nation’s 18 major rail yards. In February 2007, the time period the researchers used as a base, freight cars spent just over 28 hours on average at each yard they passed through. At the yards, trains are taken apart, inspected, and assembled to route freight around the network. “There’s a lot of demand at these yards and not a lot of resources,” Nozick says.?
From what I have been reading, the recent outbreak of swine flu might not be as serious as once thought; however, the article is a great read for insight into what kind of damage a global pandemic could inflict.
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