The Inundated Warehouse and the Pre-Positioned Stock
A regional logistics hub holds 4,200 family hygiene kits and 1,800 tarpaulins in a riverside warehouse. A flood warning is issued with a 36-hour lead time; modeling predicts a 1-in-50-year flood that will put the warehouse's ground floor under 1.2 m of water. The hub serves three districts with combined affected population estimates of 28,000 people, of whom roughly 6,000 will need shelter support. Available transport: 9 trucks with a 7-tonne capacity, each requiring 5 hours round-trip to the two safe staging sites. Warehouse staff report the kits are palletized in 40-kit blocks and the tarpaulins in 100-unit bales. A donor agreement requires that pre-positioned stock be tracked to the district level and that any relocation be documented within 72 hours.
1. What should the logistics coordinator prioritize in the next 36 hours, and how should the decision be justified?
Read the worked answer
The coordinator faces a competing-objectives problem: protect assets versus maintain readiness for the response. Key reasoning:
- Quantify the exposure. The ground floor floods to 1.2 m, so anything stored below that level is lost. The stock is only useful if it survives the hazard.
- Match stock to demand. 6,000 people need shelter support; 1,800 tarpaulins at ~1 per family (assume 5 persons/family = 1,200 families) covers roughly the shelter need, while hygiene kits (4,200) cover fewer families than the 28,000-person estimate implies. So tarpaulins are the critical, non-substitutable item and should be moved first.
- Check transport feasibility. 9 trucks × 7 t. A tarpaulin bale of 100 units is heavy; if a bale is ~150 kg, one truck carries ~46 bales = 4,600 tarpaulins, well above stock. Hygiene kits are bulkier. The round-trip is 5 hours, so each truck does ~7 trips in 36 hours - capacity is not the binding constraint; time to load and safe-site storage is.
- Decide: relocate all tarpaulins and as many kits as staging capacity allows, prioritizing the highest-vulnerability district; elevate or palletize the remainder above 1.2 m if time permits.
- Document each movement by district within the 72-hour donor window - the relocation itself is a compliance event, not just an operational one.
2. A district officer argues the stock should stay because 'moving it signals panic and undermines community confidence.' How should the coordinator respond?
Read the worked answer
This is a risk-communication versus asset-protection judgement.
The coordinator should acknowledge the legitimate concern (public perception matters, and uncoordinated visible movements can trigger panic buying or displacement) but separate what is done from how it is communicated:
- Operational necessity is not negotiable: leaving stock in a 1.2 m flood zone converts a preparedness asset into a loss and removes surge capacity exactly when it is needed.
- Communication is negotiable: frame the movement as routine pre-positioning/rotation, coordinate messaging with the district's communication focal point, and avoid alarmist language.
- Escalate if unresolved: the donor tracking obligation and the duty to preserve response capacity give the coordinator a defensible basis; the disagreement should be logged and escalated to the incident manager rather than silently overridden.
Model answer should show the coordinator not treating this as a binary (move vs. don't move) but as a sequencing and messaging problem.