18 DC VELOCITY DECEMBER 2014 www.dcvelocity.com
newsworthy
The Ebola crisis in West Africa has drawn the world’s attention to the disease’s terrible effects and the heroic efforts of
health care workers who have responded to the emergency.
What is less understood is the enormous logistics effort
required to establish the footprint needed to supply those
health care workers with the resources to execute their mission. This work is being undertaken by the U.S. military,
which is making use of its considerable logistics capabilities.
The Pentagon has launched “Operation United
Assistance,” the logistical support the U.S. military is providing to West Africa to help establish the health care footprint in hard-to-reach areas. According to the Pentagon,
“The U.S. Africa Command, through U.S. Army Africa,
provides coordination of logistics, training, and engineering
support to the U.S. Agency for International Development
(USAID) in West Africa to assist in the overall U.S. government foreign humanitarian assistance/disaster relief efforts
to contain the spread of the Ebola virus/disease, as part of
the international assistance effort supporting the governments of Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea.”
The U.S. military can do this because it has equipment
and capacity that are beyond the reach of any enterprise.
The military has more than 200 C- 17 transport aircraft,
more airframes than most countries’ air
forces have in their entire inventory. (By
way of comparison, the United Kingdom has
eight C-17s, and the Australians have six.)
The C- 17 fleet gives the U.S. military the lift
capability to reach anywhere in the world.
This kind of capacity is available to undertake missions outside of the military realm,
humanitarian relief efforts in particular.
BUILDING THE FOOTPRINT
Logisticians in the Africa Command are
responsible for the military’s humanitarian
effort in response to Ebola. They are working
on establishing 12 Ebola treatment units,
spread around Liberia, each with a 100-bed
capacity. The units will be turned over to the
local governments and staffed by local and
international health care providers, not by
military personnel. The first treatment unit
went operational at the end of October, and
the rest were scheduled to come on line in the
ensuing weeks.
United Assistance personnel have estab-
lished a training facility for health care work-
ers near Monrovia, Liberia, and an interme-
diate staging base in Senegal. They have also
set up two mobile laboratories, which are
able to turn around samples within 24 hours. An air bridge
has been established in Senegal to help with the logistics
flow, a challenging project because some areas have no
roads and in other regions, the existing roads have been
rendered impassable by mud. U.S. military V- 22 Osprey tilt
rotor aircraft are helping expedite the delivery of resources,
supplies, and personnel to some of these remote areas.
In addition, a 25-bed hospital dedicated to treating health
care workers who become infected with Ebola is up and
running, fully operational, and staffed by volunteers from
the U.S. Public Health Service.
The Pentagon is also preparing for the possibility of
an Ebola outbreak in the United States, according to the
military news publication Stars and Stripes. The preparations include the formation of a 30-person team that
could operate inside the U.S. to provide military support to
civilian authorities. “We do the same thing when there are
forest fires,” Pentagon spokesman Col. Steve Warren told
Stars and Stripes, “and obviously there are firemen who are
capable of fighting forest fires. Same situation here—this
is planning, this is creating a team who if requested ... can
support a specific location.”
—Steve Geary
U.S. military launches logistics response to Ebola crisis
Interstate Warehousing and Tippmann Group will be expanding Interstate Warehousing’s largest cold storage warehouse in
Franklin, Ind., by 309,000 square feet. Once complete, the facility
will occupy 885,000 square feet with more than 128,000 pallet positions. … Shipping supply company Uline recently purchased approximately 200 acres of farmland in Kenosha, Wis., with plans to develop a new Midwest distribution facility there. … Dachser Transport
of America Inc., a U.S. subsidiary of the global logistics services provider Dachser, is moving its local operations to a new Atlanta-based
facility. The expanded southeastern hub is fully operational and
is based on the global Dachser warehouse
standards. … Prologis has begun construction on a new development project totaling
1 million square feet (92,900 square meters)
in Tracy, Calif. Prologis International Park of
Commerce is located within a 60-mile radius
of three international airports as well as the Port of Oakland, the
Port of Stockton, and BNSF and UP intermodal facilities. … Hanson
Logistics has broken ground on additional frozen storage capacity
in the company’s Chicago consolidation center. … Southeastern
Freight Lines, a provider of regional less-than-truckload transportation services, has opened a service center in Van Buren, Ark., near
Fort Smith, in response to growing business in the region.
ground breakers
PROLOGIS
