Pauli Immonen is quick-marching the length of the tarmac at Port-au-Prince’s crippled airport, looking for a missing 737. It’s not as if he can just check the arrivals board — the 7.0 earthquake that rocked the Haitian capital eight days ago has left the main terminal a flooded, deserted husk. The floors are littered with broken ceiling tiles, and inch-wide cracks snake along the walls. Outside, Immonen skirts a blacktop crowded with military transports and chartered jets; the flock of small planes that usually roosts here has been forced onto an adjacent patch of grass. The noise is as oppressive as the afternoon heat — deep belly rumbles from taxiing aircraft, the basso whup-whupping of helicopter blades, the grumbling and reverse-signal beeps of forklifts and buses.
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Immonen hit the ground in Port-au-Prince less than 72 hours after the quake, when the streets were still strewn with corpses. He arrived from Helsinki with little more than a mosquito net, a sleeping bag, a laptop, and a sat phone. When he snatches a few hours of sleep, it’s in a tent pitched 100 yards from the airport runway. A member of one of the Red Cross’ Emergency Response Units, Immonen has been a first responder in crisis zones from Darfur to Afghanistan to Pakistan.

His job is to wrangle airplanes, making sure that the people and materiel on every Red Cross relief flight get to where they’re supposed to be.
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Despite the massive scale of their operations, only in recent years have the people who deliver disaster aid begun to benefit from the kind of data-driven decisionmaking and rigorous academic study that their commercial and military counterparts rely on. In the past decade, the responses to major disasters have been analyzed in hundreds of case studies and pored over by experts, their conclusions field-tested in subsequent crises where yet more data is collected. Learning the right lessons could not be more important: The stakes are literally life and death.

The effort to bring modern shipping methods to disaster relief is largely the inspiration of a San Francisco cargo tycoon named Lynn Fritz. He sold his own company, Fritz Cos., to United Parcel Service Inc. in 2001, banked some $200 million and started looking for a philanthropic enterprise. He soon became an evangelist for applying logistics techniques to the delivery of disaster relief, eventually founding the Fritz Institute, a nonprofit devoted to the cause. The slight, frenetic Mr. Fritz, 63, runs it from the suite where he lives at the Four Seasons Hotel in San Francisco.
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The $1 trillion cargo industry has become a repository of knowledge on how to move large amounts of goods to remote places in a big hurry.
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Mr. Fritz's idea was to bring the same regimen to disaster relief, using companies who already know how to do it and have a stake in a damaged region's recovery from disaster.
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Mr. Fritz went on to found the Fritz Institute. One of the group's biggest projects is a free software program that aid groups can use to manage emergency response in the same door-to-door fashion that freight companies use to supply their customers. The International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva put the software into operation for the tsunami. The system allowed the group for the first time to put donations and destinations together in one database so that it could quickly tell donors where supplies should be sent. "We have gained a fivefold efficiency compared to the older days," estimates Red Cross information technology specialist Sanjiv Jain.

“Logistically, this particular disaster—because of the geography and the mountainous terrain and poor roads—is probably the most difficult response I have ever had to implement,” said Alex Marianelli, senior logistics officer for Asia at the United Nations World Food Program and one of the directors of the effort that is bringing medicine, food and other supplies to the battered, impoverished nation.

In piecing together a plan for the capital of Katmandu and remote villages in Nepal’s rugged mountains, Mr. Marianelli and others in what the United Nations describes as a “logistics cluster” are applying lessons learned in earlier disasters including the 2004 Southeast Asia tsunami and the 2010 Haiti earthquake.

In Nepal’s case, the U.N.’s World Food Program actually had supplies stored at Katmandu and a response plan in place, believing that an earthquake was likely in light of the region’s particular geology.
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Katmandu is the only airport in the country that can handle the larger aircraft needed by relief groups. But there are strict weight restrictions on aircraft landing at the airport because the capital’s 4,600-foot elevation and relatively short runway make landings difficult. The 6,600-foot runway was damaged in the earthquake but has since reopened.

The airport has been choked by an influx of supplies this week, in part because workers there didn’t have enough of the heavy equipment needed to efficiently handle large quantities of food, blankets and medical material arriving with relief workers.

“In the early days, one of the challenges is the congestion at the airport,” Mr. Marianelli said in a telephone interview. “There is not enough apron space. We are trying to make sure that material can be efficiently managed, and at the same time we are bringing up the optimization in flights, trying to get more flights through the airport. We call it a slot system, and we try to ensure the flights with the most urgently required supplies are prioritized.”
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The W.F.P. is trying to identify a second “strategic entry point” to the region, so relief groups can use smaller cargo aircraft and fly in more frequently, he said. The group will then set up a “land bridge” to connect the airport to Nepal through a type of trans-shipment center familiar to cargo companies. Incoming shipments can be sent to that hub and shifted between trucks heading to different destinations.

One such airport could be Lucknow, in Northern India. It’s hundreds of miles via rough terrain from Katmandu and, Mr. Marianelli said, “That is the challenge.”

“We have tested two roads and they are okay. But that will take much longer and then, you know, it is still raining and so we face landslides,” he said.