The most recent US natural disaster, and one of the strongest examples of supply chain dysfunction was Hurricane Maria. Hurricane Maria was a category 5 hurricane that devastated Puerto Rico during late September 2017. In addition to catastrophic infrastructure damage, many lives were lost, both during the storm and due to storm related issues. These issues were only exacerbated by Hurricane Irma, a storm that had just hit the region just a couple weeks prior.
The inefficiencies of the supply chain to get critical supplies to those in need, a real tragedy of Hurricane Maria, left Puerto Rico struggling to recover months later. Many elements, ranging from unavoidable circumstances to preventable chaos contributed to the inefficiencies which severely hampered relief. The first …show more content…
This failure to understand supply chain weaknesses, resulted in relief efforts ignoring risk mitigation, which in turn exacerbated damage from the storm. For example, the need of fuel was already under stress prior to the storm due to the islands fuel based energy grid. Having one non-renewable energy source serve as the backbone energy source for generators, electricity, and transportation needs, especially when they were only a few fuel companies that monopolized the industry is a huge risk. Since fuel is a frequently scarce and needed resource after a natural disaster, relief organizations should have predicted the shortage and taken steps, or at least communicated with fuel companies to help mitigate the damage to fuel supply. Not doing so led to a severe shortage that impacted a variety of relief efforts, such as the truck transportation of supplies and capacity of fuel generators in hospitals. In addition to fuel stock, lack of risk mitigation is evident throughout the entire infrastructure, water system, healthcare, and the power grid within Puerto