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The fun & fascinating stories of Supply Chain & Logistics.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:00:03] Hi, my name is Bryndis Whitson, and you're listening to the Zebras to Apples podcast. The fun and fascinating stories of supply chain logistics. Fires, floods, tsunamis, hailstorms, earthquakes and volcanoes. They're all over the news. They truly impact all of us. And sometimes, when we least expect it. When an emergency occurs, are we prepared? What do we do to make sure that we're ready? As those of us in Girl Guides or Scouts would say, the old motto be prepared. My guest for this episode is my friend Steve Armstrong. He has spent his career making sure that institutions and organizations are prepared. Steve and I met when I was hosting a conference entitled Ready at a Moment's Notice The Logistics of the Military and Emergency Preparedness, which is exactly Steve's career. He has worked in the military with government, the Red Cross, and is a leadership expert and consultant, as well as an instructor at Mount Royal University. This interview was recorded in 2024 before the LA wildfires. When an emergency occurs, logistics experts are there to assist in the crisis, the cleanup and the rebuild. Please join me on this conversation with Steve Armstrong.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:01:23] Part of the way we met was you were working at the Red Cross, but previously before that you'd worked at the military. You've had a lot of different experiences. Maybe, let's start with just kind of a broad overview.
Steve Armstrong: [00:01:35] Oh my gosh. Okay. So it's been a checkered history I would say. I was kind of asked to leave high school because my guidance counselor suggested if I wasn't doing anything, I shouldn't do it there. And I had been a member of the Army Reserves at the time and then full time service after that. Luckily for me, because I didn't have much education and ended up working through a 22 year Army career, ending up in 98/99 as a retiring as an acting RSM and Sergeant Major. And then I spent three years in the Northwest Territories in a remote community, fly-in community with a winter road for a few months of the year called Norman Wells as a town administrator, town manager. And then I joined Red Cross the January of 2001. And I remember that distinctly, because when I was hired, I was told it was going to be a quiet, simple job, that we were to gear up and mobilize and train volunteers to be prepared to respond. And if anyone's even remotely aware, 2001 was the September 11th terrorism attack in New York City.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:02:51] Quite the timing.
Steve Armstrong: [00:02:52] Yeah, and there was also a papal visit and a big flood in the northwest or northern Ontario on James Bay. And that just launched this unbelievable trajectory into emergency and disaster management, and part of which included most every big disaster in Canada over those 12 years or so, including few trips to the States for both September 11th and then hurricanes, and then almost a year in Sri Lanka post tsunami, doing recovery work there for most of two, well, the tsunami was, if you can imagine, was 20 years ago this Christmas. And so most of 2005, I spent time both domestically and internationally working on the tsunami response. And then I ended up at the end of Red Cross, I was in charge of all of our operations in Alberta and Northwest Territories. Coincidentally, was Slave Lake and a bunch of big disasters here. We made the headlines several times in Alberta as Disaster Central and then a retiring after the southern Alberta floods, 2013. And then since then, I've been working as a consultant and a speaker and educator and coach around leadership and organizational issues for the last 10 or 11 years. So, yeah, it's quite a career.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:04:20] Very much so.
Steve Armstrong: [00:04:21] My guidance counselor would crap her pants if she knew what became of me.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:04:27] And the country's better for it.
Steve Armstrong: [00:04:30] Well, I had played a small part in a lot of little things, and as does everybody. Everybody plays their part.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:04:36] Exactly. And that's the thing. Yeah. And so when you were in the military for what you can share, is there kind of any moments or something like that that kind of stick out of interesting or fascinating moments that.
Steve Armstrong: [00:04:49] Oh my gosh, your podcast would have to be three years long to regale you.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:04:55] Well. We can always we can always continue this. Yeah.
Steve Armstrong: [00:04:59] No, there was lots. The army, I was an infantry soldier. So that is the boots on the ground, soldier. I was a pretty good soldier, I would say. And developed significantly competent as a leader. And, you know, we were forever either getting ready to deploy or being deployed wherever that might look like. Either through training operation or actual operations. You know, a lot of this stuff. Maybe nobody knows or nobody cares. But, you know, when you send soldiers into harm's way, you have to make sure they're as trained and fit and strong as they possibly can be. And as well equipped as you can make them and get them to, to go deal with things. I would say the interesting part, maybe most relevant to maybe what you're thinking about was, you know, in Bosnia and Croatia and in the early 90s and then even into Afghanistan, although I didn't, I was out before Afghanistan. You know, the way the Canadian Army was deployed, a lot was small units dispatched to remote, isolated places. So they were disconnected from the larger unit completely. Yeah. So, you know, a corporal could mistakenly start the Third World War. So you had to train people to be leaders and have them as, like I said earlier, prepared and educated and as smart as you can possibly get them to be to make sure that they could manage in these isolated pockets, like, you know, some of the movies that have been done mostly based on American stories and Afghanistan, where sergeants and platoon level 30, 40, uh, soldier teams being on a fire base or an outpost out in the middle of nowhere, dealing with a very complex, challenging situation.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:07:02] Exactly. And then getting all the other stuff out there and getting them there, let alone.
Steve Armstrong: [00:07:08] Getting them there. So if you imagine you got 40, so a ration pack of food, a field kit, if that's what you're eating on a specific operation, comes in a box about maybe the size of a probably not as big as a laptop, maybe about the size of a pad of paper and a 3 or 4 in thick by 8 by 10 sort of thing. And that's one meal. So you got 40 people.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:07:38] Right and only one meal.
Steve Armstrong: [00:07:39] And that's one meal. 40 people times three meals every day, all the time. Every day.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:07:45] And making sure you have enough to.
Steve Armstrong: [00:07:46] And make sure there's enough there to make to make sure people can eat, have food. If for whatever reason, the supply lines, resupply lines are cut off. So I don't have a full sense of what happened in Afghanistan. But in my time in the military, a soldier carried at least one day's worth of food. And then the next level of food chain up the supply chain and the command chain carried the next day's worth of food and it went up and up. So it was always a push of food out. Right. And the same thing with ammunition and/or boots and/or clothing and a million little things like even toilet paper. You can't function very well in the field if you don't have proper sanitary conditions and toilet paper.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:08:31] Exactly. Well, we were in Normandy. There was actually, one of the various different monuments and stuff like that. And in this one, they actually recognized all of the other groups that were behind the troops, like the dental, the payroll, the oh, it was extra.
Steve Armstrong: [00:08:50] So like soldiers, you can do a lot to a soldier, but you got to feed them and you got to make sure they get paid or they stop working for you. And it's even, well, they always said that it was at least a 3 to 1. So for every fighting soldier on the front lines, there was at least three people supporting that person. Which is probably low, I would think.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:09:11] I would think so because there's so many different pieces.
Steve Armstrong: [00:09:14] Yeah, yeah. Like all the way back. So the logistics of an operation like that is actually mind-blowing.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:09:22] Exactly. And that's the thing too. And so, well, in the military and stuff like that, good training for the rest of, you know, parts of your career too, so.
Steve Armstrong: [00:09:32] Oh for sure. Well, the one thing that I would say that before we move on to some of the other parts, is the one thing the military does, and it's a leadership, ties into more leadership development, but also supply chain is that you cannot become a commander or a leader in the military without doing some of these other jobs. So if you could be a rocket scientist, Teflon coated, super fit rifleman, infantry soldier, a tank driver or whatever, but to get promoted, you have to go work in the supply chain and you have to go work in the administrative side of it, and you have to work in the transport side of it, and then you will eventually get to the position where you get promoted up into a command level position. So you don't become a boss without learning about how does the toilet paper get to the front lines?
Bryndis Whitson: [00:10:24] Exactly. Knowing all the little pieces.
Steve Armstrong: [00:10:27] Yeah, yeah. Or at least, you know, at least having some experience in that so that you have a sense, okay, this is okay, it takes a day for something like this to that happens.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:10:35] Or that's what someone else does. Yeah.
Steve Armstrong: [00:10:37] Yeah. So that's a strength of at least most Western armies is that you just don't, just because you're smart and bright doesn't mean you become a boss. You have to be exposed and modestly competent in some of these other functions so that you understand when you're making command decisions and lives are at stake, that you understand how things happen behind the scenes.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:11:01] And how everything interacts with each other, like one piece affects every other part of the operation.
Steve Armstrong: [00:11:10] Yeah, yeah. It's not complicated, but it's complex.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:11:14] Right, right. But having that knowledge adds that extra big, huge piece.
Steve Armstrong: [00:11:18] Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, because you can say I want this to happen and there's no hope and all the blue skies and all the world that that could happen the way you want it to. Because all the back office hasn't caught up with you. You know, there's a great book. I want to say, it wasn't Petraeus, that's not right. But it was called Moving Mountains, and it was the, so general Norman Schwarzkopf was the commander of Allied forces for the Gulf, the first Gulf War in the early 90s. And his logistics chief was a lieutenant general, I can't remember his name. And he he ended up writing a book called Moving Mountains. And it's quite interesting about the logistics behind the first Gulf War. And at one point, if I may make a mistake on this exactly, but at one point he said that it cost seven gallons of fuel to get one gallon of fuel to a tank in the front line.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:12:18] Oh, well, yeah, when you think about it, because you got to get it there.
Steve Armstrong: [00:12:24] Got to get it there.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:12:24] And then you got to wait.
Steve Armstrong: [00:12:26] And you got to get it to across the desert. And you got to get into a fighting vehicle of some sort at the front. It's crazy.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:12:25] Yeah. And all the ways that, you know, you get there. Like, I remember seeing a video of moving jet fuel to the middle of Antarctica. And just like the amount that it costs, or just moving that one piece just to get there.
Steve Armstrong: [00:12:51] Oh, no. It's unbelievable when you think about it. So if you don't appreciate that and you think, oh, I have a battalion, I've got 40 tanks at the front line and I want them to move. There's a lot of things that have to fall into place, right? And even if you consider in a disaster setting my second career, you know, the cost of like if you look at Jasper right now.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:13:12] Yeah.
Steve Armstrong: [00:13:13] So they're saying that there's going to be temporary homes for people. Well, it's going to take months and months and months to get those. First off you have to find them. You could have trailers. Trailers are not suitable to a Canadian mountain winter. So like in a disaster setting if you look at the recent fires in Jasper, where they say like 40% of the residents homes were lost in fire. The government is well intended in saying, well, we're going to have temporary housing there for them, but, you know, they have to find housing for hundreds and hundreds of people. Yeah, they have to move them to Jasper and a camper, you know, the average human camper is not suited to being outside through a Canadian winter in the mountains. So it has to be a building of a certain standard that can withstand the winter and not freeze solid.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:14:08] Exactly.
Steve Armstrong: [00:14:09] And you have to have a sewer system, and you have to have a water system, and you have to have propane for heat and, and and, and and.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:14:17] The electricity, everything has to be there.
Steve Armstrong: [00:14:20] And land, you have to have a piece of land that you could you know, you're in a national park. So the complexities of something like that are equally insurmountable, or maybe not insurmountable, but equally challenging and complex as maybe a combat operation.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:14:36] Especially finding the space because you have to really allocate those spaces too.
Steve Armstrong: [00:14:42] Yeah, and there isn't space. It's a, most people wouldn't realize that in a national park if there's a town in a national park, they are completely confined by their boundary of the municipality, and you just can't bulldoze trees out of the way and start another subdivision somewhere else. When I was interviewed a few times earlier about Jasper, you know, there's another town in British Columbia in summer of 2000, of 21 called Lytton that burnt to the ground. So that was 2 or 300 homes that were completely evaporated, incinerated and turned to dust. Right? Some have been rebuilt. But imagine how long it takes to build a subdivision in a modern urban city like Calgary or Toronto or Montreal of 250 homes. It takes years. It takes years. And you basically have to start from scratch because you can't trust any infrastructure under the ground because it went through.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:15:37] Because it has to restart. Everything has to be rebuilt.
Steve Armstrong: [00:15:39] Yeah. Yeah. Because you don't know what happened under the ground in this gigantic inferno that tore through this town. So for someone to say that these homes will be up and built and ready in a matter of a few months is a well-intended lie.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:15:53] Well, you look at Linton and years later it's still taking... yeah.
Steve Armstrong: [00:15:57] It takes forever. It takes forever. And people say well that's just the logistics of it. And then you have the human impact of it. And people will move on.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:16:07] Yeah. Well the one thing I always remember too, that one of the workshops we had, and it was a mayor of a town that had fire and said that they were really good at giving out, you know, information of like what will happen next. And because as we go through these national disasters or fires or floods or something like that, that different things occur. And what they said was the first year, this and this and this is what you need to invest in. And in the second year, it's the mental health supports because it's the second year when you need that. Mhm. And you can start, when you look at other things that have occurred on global or national scales or local scales. You see that piece too.
Steve Armstrong: [00:16:57] Yeah, absolutely. Like it's so complicated. Like the infrastructure part can all be fixed. It takes time. But then you've got people involved with this story too, right. And their emotions and then their feelings. And you know, right now there's people in these towns that have been incinerated across the world, specifically North America and Canada, who there could be one home left in a block that for some reason didn't get burned up, and they're in their house looking out their window every day at their neighbors. Gone.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:17:32] Yeah.
Steve Armstrong: [00:17:33] And then maybe in a couple of years, they'll look out their window at their neighbors and see these big, modern, fancy new homes built on the old lots. And then they'll be going, well, I'm still in my old house.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:17:46] Exactly. And the difference is there, too, because one has insurance, the other is there because it's, yeah.
Steve Armstrong: [00:17:54] Well. And that's. Yeah. You're exactly right. That's on the premise that everybody has a level of wealth and a level of insurance and a level of protection that they can get over this, and not everybody does. There's people that lived in Jasper for, you know, whatever I saw, there was a person that was on the news the other day that had lived there for 40 years. Well, when they bought their house 40 years ago, it wasn't a $1.5 million piece of property. It was a $20,000 piece of property. And they may only have had insurance on it because they needed a mortgage of 25,000. They could be woefully underinsured to rebuild their home. And they're probably old and retired, so they don't have wealth. Their runway is quite short for recovery because you're old, right? Maybe if you're 20 and you lose everything, you still got 40 years to work before to recover. But if you're 60 or 70 or whatever, you don't have that length of time to recover. So for people to get over that is super challenging. Really hard on the community and mostly on individuals.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:19:06] Well, you even when we look at what happened in Port Aux Basque and the housing and stuff like that, and they were saying, well, there's nowhere we can live because all the houses were taken like, yeah.
Steve Armstrong: [00:19:18] Yeah. Yeah. And you need housing for the workers. You're going to need a small army of workers showing up to build this house. And if you want to think about the logistics of it and the supply chain of it. So Jasper is, I forget, maybe about a 4 hour, 3 to 4 hour drive from Edmonton, maybe the best part of a half an hour to an hour from the next biggest town, which would be a place called Hinton. And you have to transport everything. Nails, screws, insulation, widgets, hammers.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:19:53] And you've got a Canadian winter coming.
Steve Armstrong: [00:19:54] And you got a winter coming. And I don't know if you've ever done a home renovation project. There's always one thing you need that you got to run back to the store for, which is now an hour, you know, at least a two hour return trip at the minimum.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:20:11] Yeah. And you still have to get it because you haven't. Yeah.
Steve Armstrong: [00:20:13] It might be small, but if you don't have it. But even simple things like you think about that Jasper like, gosh bless the city of Calgary, like they opened up a reception center for, but nobody did the math. So if you leave Jasper in the middle of the night and you have to go west through BC, it's well, at best it's a five hour drive, I guess maybe. But if you got to go, the only way out is to go west through the mountains of BC. It becomes a 14 hour drive.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:20:43] Right. Which is why there was, yeah.
Steve Armstrong: [00:20:46] Or whatever, give or take. You leave at 2 in the morning plus 14 is at least supper time the next night. And then you got to stop for gas and food. All those people looking for gas from the next little rinky dinky town. Good luck. And then you show up and the Calgary people closed the reception center at 7:00 or 8:00 because they said, well, nobody's here tonight. Well, it took 20 hours to get there. Yeah. Like it was a math problem that somebody never thought about.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:21:18] True. Yeah. It totally, yeah.
Steve Armstrong: [00:21:21] Yeah. So, you know, it's a simple, at the broadest definition of supply chainn it was a relatively simple problem to at least think through. But I'm not really, I don't want to be too critical because nobody's, like they would never even thought about it. Well, we've been here all day. Nobody showed.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:21:38] Right. Because you're not thinking about the trip. Exactly. And you also don't know where people are stopping along the way.
Steve Armstrong: [00:21:45] You have to stop, right? Yeah. You left their house at 2 in the morning. You don't have anything. You're lucky if you have your wallet and maybe a toothbrush, right?
Bryndis Whitson: [00:21:52] Yeah, completely.
Steve Armstrong: [00:21:53] And your kids and your dog and whatever it is. And you're hoping every gas station has full fuel tanks in it, and you have money to buy gas, like, you know, the, the number of things that are complexities just to that little problem, which is a huge problem to the individual is unbelievable.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:22:13] Well, even the gas issue, that's totally a thing you wouldn't think of because it's more of a northern, remote, northern remote town in BC. They only have limited supply. It's only. Yeah.
Steve Armstrong: [00:22:26] So when I was at Norman Wells, we had this brainwave one year. I think it was 2000. It must have been this, must have. So the snowbirds were coming.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:22:35] Mhm.
Steve Armstrong: [00:22:36] They offered to come. And we thought oh that's awesome. They want to come. So let's do it. And so we were putting all these plans in place for the snowbirds to do an air show in Norman Wells of a town of maybe there was 2000 people in the whole region. Until the guy who had the fuel contract for the airport phoned up and he said, you know, those guys will burn up our whole year's supply worth of fuel in two days. And there is no road. There is no pipeline like to bring fuel in. There is no way of getting fuel there. So we couldn't host the snowbirds because it would have taken at least a year in advance notice to pre-position enough fuel to have the snowbirds come. And those who are listening, the snowbirds are Canadian Armed Forces, Canadian Air Force's acrobatic demonstration jets. And they burn up a lot of fuel.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:23:33] Yeah, right. Because there's at least 10 planes that they fly with.
Steve Armstrong: [00:23:39] And they do it in high speed, super cool stuff, which is not efficient fuel burning. Right. So, you know, it's, you know, these communities don't have the level of resources even to do something nice, let alone to respond.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:23:55] Yeah, completely. The one thing I remember you saying, one of the presentations you did for some supply chain students is talking about how finding a space for the rubble or wherever and finding that extra space, because that's, and it's one of those pieces of, you know, when we think of a emergency preparedness and, you know, all of that kind of thing we don't think of well, where does the debris go once it leaves that spot?
Steve Armstrong: [00:24:24] Yeah. Well, first of all, you have to have the equipment and people to move the debris. Even in Fort Mac, the Fort McMurray fires and even in Jasper, like, the first thing people have to do is make sure it's safe. And then you have to move it. And a lot of it is actually considered hazardous waste. So it has to go to, in North America and Canada it has to go to a special landfill because it's hazardous waste, it's heavy metals and whatnot. And the ash of the burnt out house.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:24:57] And then you have to figure out the logistics of getting it from that, from where you are to that spot.
Steve Armstrong: [00:25:01] Because you're not long filling up a dump. Right. So, you know, I don't know in Jasper where the landfill would be, I suspect likely it's outside of the national park someplace. But if you start taking the debris from 250 homes to a landfill. You're not long filling it up. And Haiti, I can't remember exactly the stats to be perfectly honest. But I would, you know, you could fill the the SkyDome in Toronto, like, 50 times over with the debris.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:25:34] Oh, completely.
Steve Armstrong: [00:25:35] And you're on a small, relatively small island. So where does that go? And you just can't dump it in the sea. Where does it go? And you don't have the facilities there to recycle, like you might have here, where you can grind up concrete and pavement and turn it back into concrete and pavement. So it's a huge logistics nightmare.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:25:54] Yeah. And then you have to either ship it if it's leaving the island, then it has to, there has to actually be a ship that's available that actually can fit it.
Steve Armstrong: [00:26:06] And engineering, if you're going to put it someplace like we the Canadian Red Cross built a hospital in Haiti following the 2012 earthquake. And they did use a lot of the debris as the fill to build this hospital. But it takes unbelievable engineering to make sure that the ground is going to be stable. So the hospital doesn't fall down. Certainly just falls down, period, but you're in an earthquake zone that caused the disaster in the first place. Right. So you have to, the ground has to be stable and secured and engineered in a way that it's going to maintain the hospital that you're going to put on top of it.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:26:44] And not crumble like it had previously.
Steve Armstrong: [00:26:48] So when somebody says, well, why didn't, why isn't that being rebuilt faster? Well, that's the easy thing to say. If you just think, oh, you're going to put up a hospital. But it's never that simple. There's a million jumps, hoops to jump through. Haiti was a wee bit this way in that the Canadians and the Canadian Red Cross developed a collapsible house, prefab house, that would fold down and you could knock it down flat and ship it, and then you could bolt it all together. But in Haiti, most land is owned by somebody somewhere. And if it was attached to a slab of concrete on the ground, it belonged to the ground and then belonged to the owner of the property. But if it wasn't that built that way, it belonged to the person that you gave the house to. So we had to make sure that when we gave somebody a house that they had that wealth, the wealth that wasn't real a lot of money, but they had the asset of the house and could move it if they needed to. But if as soon as you put it on concrete on the ground, it belonged to the landowner, and that family was at risk of being evicted at any second by an unscrupulous person.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:28:02] That's totally things you don't think of.
Steve Armstrong: [00:28:04] Yeah. Why would you think about that? Sri Lanka, when I was there, we were buying land for, I think we were, our plan was to build 5000 homes. Seems high, but something like that. If we bought a piece of land the next day, we'd be in court being sued by 11 people that had 11 completely legitimate looking title to deeds, property to the one property. Because with the right amount of money, you could get a deed to anything. So the risk of putting a family in a home on a piece of property, that title wasn't secure to, just put that family at a huge risk down the road.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:28:38] Oh, yeah.
Steve Armstrong: [00:28:39] Yeah. So all of these things make it super hard. Interestingly, I think in Sri Lanka, I think this is where I got the 5000 house number from, Bryndis, but in Sri Lanka they only built 5000 homes a year. And we needed 50,000 homes after the tsunami. Not we, but the country did. Needed to have because.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:29:02] They were all.
Steve Armstrong: [00:29:03] They were all destroyed. So if you imagine if you have the economic and industry capacity to build 5000 things in any given year, and all of a sudden you needed ten times that built within a very short time. What does that do to the cost of everything? Labor. Material.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:29:25] Needing to bring people in to assist with the building?
Steve Armstrong: [00:29:27] Yeah. And when you have people that have a lot of, there's a lot of money in play and unscrupulous people in play, bad things are inevitably going to happen. Somebody is going to get taken advantage of somewhere along the way.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:29:41] Oh, completely. Yeah.
Steve Armstrong: [00:29:42] So just to, you know, to build a house is not. And when I'm talking about house, I'm not talking about house in Canada. We're building a small 20 by 20, maybe 20 by 20 concrete or bricks house, one room maybe two room house. So it's not complicated or hard, but you still need a certain level of capacity and skill to do it.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:30:06] Yeah, totally. And these are things that you normally wouldn't think of in some respects.
Steve Armstrong: [00:30:13] Why would you until you go and try to do something?
Bryndis Whitson: [00:30:17] Which is the, which is that piece that there's all the, or if we think back to that, the known unknowns. Yeah. And you don't know the things you don't know. Yeah.
Steve Armstrong: [00:30:27] You don't know until you're there. Now lucky for me, I've had this amazing adventure in this big, big fun career based on the backs of millions of misfortunate people. I've seen these things happen. So when we were, my most recent deployment was on a contract to consult to the city of Merritt during the atmospheric floods in the fall of 2021. And I was there for five months through the Christmas or January through the first part of the year. Half of the year. So I knew what, maybe I didn't know the exact circumstances, but I knew something was, I knew all the things that could go wrong. So I was able to advise and consult people on things like the landfill.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:31:14] Mhm. Oh yeah.
Steve Armstrong: [00:31:16] You realize you have 600 homes worth of at least, at best, drywall and insulation from the basements and sometimes whole houses that are going to have to go to a landfill.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:31:30] And so yeah. Can, do you have the space or can?
Steve Armstrong: [00:31:33] Yeah. Do you have the space. How are we going to manage this. Some of it is like there, a lot of these homes are older homes. Asbestos. You know. And how do you manage that family that has to, not only do they have to pay 20, 10 to $20,000 to dispose of their home, they have to worry about asbestos and hazardous materials and.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:31:58] All those extra things that. Yeah.
Steve Armstrong: [00:32:00] Gosh, it's mind boggling. And you're up to your eyeballs and trying to just survive.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:32:07] Well. And in that situation, too, there's also the sewage backup, there's the flooding, there's the mold that's starting to grow. There's the..
Steve Armstrong: [00:32:15] Oh it's terrible. Well, just a quick story. There was a, down the valley downstream from the city, the town of Merritt, was a long, flat valley called the Nicola Valley. Doesn't really matter, but there was a couple of farms that were organic farms. Well, as soon as the floodwater washed over their land, with all of the crap that it took from upstream, they've lost their organic status.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:32:44] Right. And that's what they did.
Steve Armstrong: [00:32:46] That's their, that was their livelihood.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:32:48] Oh and yeah there's no way to.
Steve Armstrong: [00:32:52] You can't jump through that hoop again. I don't know exactly what became of those people. But you know I think it's like not insignificant. It's like you have to have five years clear or ten years clear of organic, not using anything that's considered non-organic on your farm to have that classification.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:33:13] Yeah, that's a huge way that, you know, the impacts that you don't even, you know, expect.
Steve Armstrong: [00:33:21] No, I mean, again, wouldn't even think about it until afterwards. And then there was this gigantic, huge, a monumental, unbelievable logistics and engineering success story by rebuilding the Coquihalla Highway. Coincidentally, the reason it was so successful and opened so fast, like entire bridges were washed out of that highway, miles of highway were all tore apart. But at the same time, the Trans Mountain pipeline was being built through that same area. And they had all of this equipment there.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:33:54] And the equipment was right there, right there at the...
Steve Armstrong: [00:33:56] Right at side of the highway...
Bryndis Whitson: [00:33:56] At the right period of time, ready to go.
Steve Armstrong: [00:33:59] So they reopened a highway that rightfully, probably could have been closed for a year or longer. At least they got it operating again within a few months, which was unbelievable.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:34:11] Yeah, it was hard to believe. The amount of impact that.
Steve Armstrong: [00:34:15] But that was luck.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:34:15] And just the timing of one being right beside at that moment.
Steve Armstrong: [00:34:20] Yeah, that was unbelievable luck. And they were able to bring bridging equipment. They had bridges and bailey bridges and temporary bridging and all sorts of stuff. They were just haul it up out of the pipeline and lay it down on the highway.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:34:32] Yeah, because they were already building temporary bridges and stuff like that too. So all of the right equipment was there at the right moment in time.
Steve Armstrong: [00:34:39] But down at the bottom of the mountain where the town was, people were going, where's my help? Now I get it. You know you got an economic corridor that's worth, I don't know what, hundreds of million dollars a day or a week. That's a priority. But then you got people down there trying to figure out how to dispose of their soggy insulation and drywall from their basement. It creates an unhealthy dynamic, right?
Bryndis Whitson: [00:35:08] Completely. It adds that parallel. Yeah. Yeah. But I think that timing of like it's amazing the impacts that the flood in Vancouver would happen. So at the time our very old Siberian Husky only liked to eat one type of dog food. And it came out of Chilliwack and it was hard to find that dog food because of the fact that because of the atmospheric river, they had hard time getting the meat coming into Cargill near Brooks in Alberta, going across, getting to the plant, making the the product and then coming back. And I tried to source it. I tried to buy it directly from the company. And they were like, we can't, this is the only place that you can do. But it was, but the impacts were a combination of Covid originally, and then you had the atmospheric river and the inability to drive across, you know, either getting your products to or from. And so suddenly there was this shortage of this dog food.
Steve Armstrong: [00:36:18] Oh, yeah. It was unbelievable. Well, even I recall it was at Christmas. You couldn't get a turkey.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:36:26] Right? Because all the turkey farms.
Steve Armstrong: [00:36:27] Turkey farms had closed down. And even as a logistics headache. So eventually someone decided, well, we can go south from Vancouver into the States, across the States and back up into southern Alberta, which is, it adds time and money for sure, but the number of truck drivers that can't cross the border for whatever life story. What they have is not insignificant. So if you can't cross the border, your drivers can't cross the border.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:36:54] Or depending on the product inside the truck, it can't enter another space too.
Steve Armstrong: [00:37:01] Yeah. Yeah, that's probably true too. I think, I do believe that a lot of those things were kind of, you know, ironed over between the two governments, but still, it's a nightmare. It's a complete nightmare. Yeah, yeah. There's an increased cost, time and energy and money and all that stuff. But just moving stuff around is nuts, you know, anybody tries to cross the border, just driving to the States or back is challenging, let alone trying to figure out how to get all these thousands of trucks that used to just drive from Vancouver to Calgary. So these things are completely hard, complex, right? Like it's like the ripple effect of a decision is the, you know, the repercussions. Like if you look at Meritt now, Jasper, even in Fort McMurray, Wood Buffalo, like the actual ripple effect of of a single event that lasted maybe a day and a half ripples for ten years.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:37:59] Minimum. And then when you put it across multiple places and multiple times.
Steve Armstrong: [00:38:04] Yeah, I know it's a bit out of scope, but like eventually it's going to get to the point where you're not going to be able to buy even insurance for some of these communities and some of these places, because insurance companies are going to say, I'm not, we're not doing that. You can't buy, you know, lots of places in Florida the number of insurance companies have abandoned the state of Florida because of hurricanes is unbelievable. So if you can't and if you can't get homeowner insurance, you can't get a mortgage.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:38:30] And you can't get. Exactly. And you can't get all of those other pieces that you need to do to protect those houses.
Steve Armstrong: [00:38:36] So it's, the repercussions of some of these things. But yeah, it's, you know, the beauty of it is or the opportunity is, there's lots of opportunity.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:38:47] And that's, and I think it's knowing what those pieces are so you can hopefully effectively, you know, make a difference in people's lives. And I think the quicker you put things together that helped in those areas, I think that's pretty key.
Steve Armstrong: [00:39:02] Yeah, I think so. I think it's, there's, you know, but the issue is if I go back to the Coquihalla and the Merritt story, right. The government pats itself on the back and says, what a huge success the response was because the highway is open. But there's hundreds of people, individuals that are struggling. So it's how you talk about it and how you communicate it.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:39:27] And how do we make sure that we're caring for everyone.
Steve Armstrong: [00:39:31] That's right. These are profoundly intimate human experiences, the worst kind of human experience. You've lost your house. You lost everything in your house. You know? You know, wait till Christmas time when somebody goes to put up a Christmas tree and they're, all their Christmas decorations. The baby's first whatever Christmas baubles are all melted in the heap in the bottom of a basement where the house used to be.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:39:55] Exactly. Or when the floods happen, and it's all destroyed from that or all those moments.
Steve Armstrong: [00:40:02] They're gone. Yeah. So I think, how do we respect people in a way that honors that and helps them recover in their own way?
Bryndis Whitson: [00:40:11] And I think that's the biggest thing we have to make sure is when there's always a human aspect behind those moments, or there's, if something happens that slows something else down, there's still a person at the end of that or something.
Steve Armstrong: [00:40:30] So, you know, I don't know who all is listening to this, but you and I both live in the city of Calgary, and we just had a pretty miserable summer with a major water main burst.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:40:41] Twice.
Steve Armstrong: [00:40:42] Twice, shutdown and water restrictions. I don't know that of course there'll be some people, but most people appreciate that stuff happens and they have a high tolerance for stuff happening. But it's how are you talked to while that's happening? And quite frankly, I think a lot of people that were in charge of communications let lawyers get in the way of being human and talked about in a way that didn't expose the organizations involved to risk. And that frustrates people.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:41:14] And the more you can inform people. And I think that's the big piece.
Steve Armstrong: [00:41:19] You don't have to burst out in tears over it. But people want to have somebody to talk to them with little empathy, that they understand that a mom with 2 or 3 little babies in a house may not have the privilege of not showering and bathing every day.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:41:37] Exactly. We're having a little bit of a larger, you know, laundry than someone else might.
Steve Armstrong: [00:41:43] Like I don't, it was an inconvenience to me. It wasn't bad. But if I don't, I don't have a house full of babies. How do we speak to people. How do we talk to them. How do we explain to people what's happening around them. If you're honest with people and you're forthright with people, they may not like the answer. Who wants to hear that answer? That it's going to take months before something happens. But they know. Oh, okay. Thank you. Now, I know I have to do my own thing here.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:42:11] Exactly. And I think that communication truly is one of those key pieces and takeaways, too, of just, you know, really caring for people.
Steve Armstrong: [00:42:21] And even simple things. We were just talking about it with another client of mine just recently who was, just tell him what's going on. Nobody wants to be surprised. Nobody wants to be let down. So pick up the phone. Phone the person up and say this happened. We'll fix it. They're not going to be happy.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:42:38] No, but I think people appreciate the honesty.
Steve Armstrong: [00:42:41] And be a little bit empathetic to them. They'll be fine.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:42:46] Yeah. Well I really appreciate, there's so many more things that we could talk about too.
Steve Armstrong: [00:42:51] Oh my gosh. Talk for days about some of this stuff.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:42:53] Exactly. This is just the start.
Steve Armstrong: [00:42:56] Well, it's been lovely. I hope it was helpful because it was quite arranging.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:43:02] Well and that's the thing. We just see where the conversation kind of takes, because what people I, you know, it's yes, it's supply chain logistics but it impacts so many other things. And leadership is key. Communication is key. All of those pieces, whether it's in your industry of supply chain logistics or in another area, all of those pieces and each spot along the chain truly has an impact along. Yeah.
Steve Armstrong: [00:43:30] Oh, yeah. And like I said earlier, it's not complicated at all, what we're trying to do. Move something from point A to point B, or put somebody back in a house, that's fairly straightforward, but it's infinitely complex.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:43:43] Exactly. And being aware as much as you can about any one of those factors. Or if we choose to do this, this might happen. If we choose to do that, that happened instead.
Steve Armstrong: [00:43:55] That's right. And it's so mercurial. There's a concept called wicked problems. I don't know if you're aware of the concept. It's in social, mostly in social thinking. It's like the problem is so complex. You have, anything you do will impact, and you have no idea how it's going to turn out down the road. So this problem is so amorphous and mercurial that every time you touch it, it moves.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:44:19] Oh, yeah.
Steve Armstrong: [00:44:20] And every input you do to try to address the problem could have a ripple effect years down the road that you can't even imagine, you know. So yeah, it's quite an interesting concept.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:44:31] Completely. And you make that one change and who knows what.
Steve Armstrong: [00:44:34] No idea what's going to happen next.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:44:36] Completely. So it's just being aware of those pieces.
Steve Armstrong: [00:44:39] And know that, right. As Donald Rumsfeld, the once erstwhile secretary of defense for the United States government under the second Bush government, said there is things we know, things we knew, he said. And there were things we knew we didn't know, and there were things we didn't know we didn't know.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:44:57] Yeah, the known unknowns.
Steve Armstrong: [00:44:59] And that third thing is the one that's going to get you every time. Yeah.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:45:02] Completely. And that's what we've got to work on. Well, thank you so much.
Steve Armstrong: [00:45:08] Oh it was fun. Yeah, it was great fun. Thank you.
Bryndis Whitson: [00:45:12] Thank you for listening to this Zebras to Apples podcast episode. I hope you enjoyed the showcase of the fun and fascinating stories of supply chain logistics. If you like this episode, I would love it if you could give it a rating and review. For more information about this topic, you can go to ZebrasToApples.com, or follow Zebras to Apples on the social media platform of your choosing, whether that's Instagram, Facebook, Twitter/X, BlueSky, or LinkedIn. You can support the show on Patreon. Also, check out the show notes below. Please join me again for another episode of Zebras to Apples. Have a wonderful day!