Having stockpiles is a good idea. Now, what should be in them?

The schools have been closed for weeks, but the COVID-19 pandemic has still provided a wealth of educational experiences.

We have learned, for example, that there is a Strategic National Stockpile.

Did you know before now there was such an animal as the Strategic National Stockpile? We neither. Yet in a matter of weeks we have gone from being unaware of its existence to not just debating its deficiencies in coping with the crisis of the moment but considering such broad, existential questions as the nature of the global supply chain and the implications for emergency preparedness in our own homes, businesses and communities.

Not only does the Strategic National Stockpile exist, it has its very own website: www.phe.gov, one that was until a few months ago likely a dusty, rarely visited corner of the internet. The SNS is administered by the federal Department of Health and Human Services, and serves as “the nation’s supply of life-saving pharmaceuticals and medical supplies … for use in a public health emergency.”

According to a YouTube video (yup, the stockpile has one of those, too), the SNS was established in 1999 as a stopgap measure in case Y2K proved to be real. Since then it has been tapped for such calamities as 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. The stockpile also contains “countermeasures for chemical, biological, and radiological emergencies that are not available on the commercial market.” Medicines, equipment and supplies are stored at warehouses around the country (locations, not surprisingly, not disclosed).

The SNS would have labored on in relative obscurity, fulfilling its mission as summarized by a director in the YouTube video as “get the right thing to the right place at the right time, every time,” had COVID-19 not hit. In its defense, the stockpile says it is “primarily designed and resourced to address discrete events like smaller, limited displacements or localized disasters, such as hurricanes or terrorist attacks.” The pandemic was anything but small, local and discrete.

Not shockingly, the stockpile was not up to the task of meeting exponentially greater demand for ventilators and personal protective equipment.

Well, fine – next time just build more and bigger warehouses and stuff them with more stuff. Sounds straightforward enough. It’s not. There’s a lot more to building a usable and useful stockpile than buying inventory, shelving it and leaving it until needed. The inventory is susceptible to damage, deterioration, spoilage and obsolescence. It has to be monitored, maintained, protected and replaced. That’s an expensive proposition. And how do you know what you’re going to need when a catastrophe strikes? How much of everything can you, should you, stockpile?

This country has been wrestling with these questions for a long time. Americans are at least vaguely aware of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, a stockpile of crude oil set up back when the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries could wreak havoc on the American economy simply by crimping the supply of oil like a garden hose. So much has changed since those days, including the boom in domestic production and a worldwide glut of supply, that there are now debates over whether there’s still a need for such a stockpile.

Those aren’t the only stockpiles in existence. There’s also a National Defense Stockpile of critical materials. The electric utility industry has been building its own emergency stockpile of items like transformers that require long lead times to produce. And there are likely more that we don’t know about and won’t hear of until some catastrophe hits.

Because we’ve been walloped by a catastrophe, we have occasion to rethink the whole notion of stockpiles. Should we have more of them, for state and local governments, for industries and individual companies, for households?

Americans caught a lot of grief and ridicule in recent months over their purchases of large quantities of toilet paper, sanitizing wipes, cleaning supplies, food and anything else they thought might be in short supply. That behavior became a self-fulfilling prophecy as store shelves were stripped bare of those essentials.

Those doing the panic buying might not have been as irrational as they’ve been depicted. They’ve been told for years to have supplies of food, water, batteries, medicines and such in preparation for when the Big One hits. Given how often expert opinion has been off the mark during this pandemic, some skepticism on the part of the public that all might not be well wasn’t misplaced. When individuals do it, it’s called hoarding. When government does it, it’s called stockpiling.

For business to get into stockpiling would merely require a 180-degree pivot from the teachings of the last four decades. Idle inventory – which is what a stockpile is – not only doesn’t earn money, it costs money. Better to keep inventory to a minimum, and accept supplies, raw materials and parts only when needed.

The supply chain is incredibly efficient and productive when all conditions are right, but the drive to cut costs and rely on ever tighter just-in-time delivery schedules has drained resiliency and flexibility from the system. Couple that with the loss of domestic production capacity – another issue we’re going to be kicking around long after the virus is vanquished – and you’ve got problems of a scope no stockpile is going to get you out of.

Perhaps there’s no middle ground that balances the need for preparedness with the costs of stockpiles, and we’ll just have to live with the risks of not having enough of the right things in the right place at the right time no matter how much we spend. Still, when this is over, it wouldn’t hurt us individually or as a nation to pay a visit to the garage or basement, even if those storage areas are gargantuan warehouses serving entire states, and poke around to see what’s there and what ought to be.