Monthly Archives: February 2013

Updates

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The 3 main scopes of the NSEMO project we are helping with are sourcing commodities, development of transportation routes, and distribution of emergency supplied to impacted population. Sourcing of commodities involves forming a coalition between the public and private sector for sourcing, logistics, and supply chain management. The Integrated Network for Emergency Transportation (iNET) is part of the proposed plan to develop a transportation system in order to minimize delay and disruption in British Columbia’s just-in-time delivery of supplies. The third aspect of the plan is to implement the Community point of distributions (CPOD) to distribute life-sustaining commodities at the community level.

We had a group meeting to specify the aspects of the project we want to undertake. From the presentation by our client, we had an overview of the characteristics of mustor zones and saw features of the muster zones that are in the North Shore area. Muster zones are where multiple modes of transportation converge and where supplies are received. Muster zones are inlcuded in areas such as Cates Park, Ambleside Park, and Horseshoe Bay. We have discussed within our group about undertaking the assessment of two of the muster zones. We will be reporting on the evaluations and offering recommendations to NSEMO. We would also like to undertake the community resource distribution program with consultation with our client.

We will keep reviewing the provided project documents to help us create a general framework of how we want to develop the distribution system. The maps provided will allow us to familiarize ourselves with the features of the muster zones we want to evaluate. The next meeting with the client will be either on Thursday Feb. 21st  or Friday Feb. 22nd, where we will be discussing our ideas so far and taking guidelines.

Details and Scope of the Project

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After having met Mr. Mike Andrews on Wednesday and getting a very detailed overview, we are now mostly briefed on the current situation regarding our project and the entire spectrum of what we could contribute to. In this post, we will outline some basic information that we have learned and what we wish to do with the project.

With a population center as urban as the North Shore communities (North Vancouver and West Vancouver), there is a need for a constant stream of supplies which facilitate the day to day activities of the city. In the event of a disaster, that stream of supplies is cut off. Many important items that people depend on will run critically low in a short frame of time. With our current project, our ultimate goal is to contribute to a system that will enable us to prepare for and mitigate disaster scenarios. Within that broad spectrum, there are many subcategories that we could focus on as well, such as planning the following:

  • efficient and safe ways to bring help to those who need it
  • different methods supplies could be transported to the affected areas
  • the gathering and bringing emergency response personnel to affected locations.
  • the reduction of panic and subsequent chaos that may befall the public
  • locations where emergency personnel and supplies can be brought in through different modes of transport

From the meeting, we have gained an understanding of what the NSEMO desires. Due to the amount of information and the complete overview of the project given to us, we are required to cut the entire scope down to focus and fit our time frame and availability. The next objective on our agenda is to decide on what our plans are regarding the extent we wish to contribute to the project.

Additional Project Information.

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Due to the mismatching of schedules, our information session with the North Shore Emergency Management Office will not occur until Wednesday, February 6th. Without obtaining more information, we are not able to relay the details of our project. Instead, this blog post will contain what we are planning to do and the division of different responsibilities.

Our current focus is on setting up the resources, file distribution system that we will use, communication fronts, and the scheduling of team meetings. With the information that was already provided to us, a rough schedule could be constructed. From the information, we can see that this project will be broken into four distinct components: researching, developing a plan for the emergency supply chain (which can be further broken down once we have more details), creating a report to showcase our plan, and creating a presentation. 

With those 4 general steps in mind, it is easy to see that a majority of the focus will be on the research and planning phases. Given that this project will end during late March, we will have approximately eight weeks to complete everything. With those eight weeks, five will most likely go into research and planning, two into writing the report, and one week in composing the presentation.

Our group has decided to meet once a week to keep each other updated. Currently, Herman is tasked with keeping up the technical back-end (technical drawings, file systems, and information distribution), Coco, Carrie, and Ibtida are focusing on research, and Weike (pronounced “wake”) will be mainly handling communications.