The 72-Hour Problem

A volunteer named Karen Merzenich documented what she found at an evacuation shelter in Petaluma during the 2017 Northern California wildfires. The shelter housed roughly 100 people. By 4 p.m. on a single day, she had boxed up 5,000 surplus toothbrushes, 3,000 sticks of deodorant, hundreds of gallons of hand sanitizer, and more used blankets than she could count. "Sites languish for needed funds," she wrote afterward, "while they are literally drowning in unsolicited donations of goods."

That was a shelter with 100 evacuees. Maui had 12,000 displaced residents.

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When the Lahaina wildfire destroyed more than 3,800 housing units in August 2023, the response from donors across the country was immediate and overwhelming — in both senses of the word. Within days, warehouses and distribution centers across the island were overflowing with goods. Relief officials halted distributions at some locations not because they lacked product, but because volunteers couldn't sort fast enough to keep the floor clear. FEMA took five days to arrive. The community-run food banks and pop-up distribution sites were already buried.

Emergency management professionals have a name for this. They call it the "second disaster" — the logistical crisis that follows the physical one, generated not by the event itself but by the speed and volume of the response to it. Research on disaster relief supply chains finds that 50 to 70 percent of goods arriving during emergencies are neither needed nor appropriate for the recovery or the region. Yet the goods keep coming, because the giving happens faster than the knowing.

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The root problem isn't generosity. It's sequence.

Donors give in the first hours. Trucks move in the first hours. The organizations on the receiving end — charitable warehouses, faith-based distribution networks, community food banks running pop-up disaster relief sites — are making intake decisions in real time with no shared picture of what's already there, what's inbound, or what each location actually needs. A warehouse management system built for normal operations wasn't designed for a week when inbound volume doubles overnight. A paper log or a shared spreadsheet offers no early warning.

The result is predictable and well-documented. After the 2010 Haiti earthquake, donated goods piled onto the Port-au-Prince airport tarmac and blocked incoming relief flights for 48 hours — not because of any organizational failure of will, but because no one had visibility into what was arriving until it was already there. In Maui in 2023, coordination between nonprofits and logistics partners eventually cleared the backlog, but only after the overflow had already stalled distribution to the people who needed it.

The 72-hour window isn't when the chaos peaks. It's when the decisions that produce the chaos get made, before anyone has enough information to make them well.

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What changes with real-time inventory visibility is not the volume of donations — that will always surge in a disaster — but the ability to act before the overflow rather than after it. When distribution organizations can see, in real time, what's on hand across every site, what's inbound, and what each location is requesting, they can redirect in-kind donations before a warehouse floor is impassable. They can tell a church partner that Site A has 400 cases of water and needs cots, while Site B has cots and needs water. That kind of coordination doesn't require a logistics army. It requires a shared, accurate picture of what exists and where.

During the Maui wildfire response, American Logistics Aid Network coordinated with nonprofits and trucking companies to clear donation backlogs by matching supply to need across locations. The tool they used was coordination. The gap they were filling was information.

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Nonprofit inventory management and donation tracking software built for normal warehouse operations has historically not been designed for this scenario — the sudden doubling of inbound volume at multiple sites simultaneously, with rotating volunteers who have no training and unreliable connectivity. That gap is what leaves charitable warehouse networks managing GIK donations on paper and phone calls during the hours when the decisions matter most.

The 72-hour window closes whether organizations are ready for it or not. History shows that a well-meaning public will always move faster than any single organization's intake capacity. The question is whether the charitable warehouse management systems behind those organizations can see what's coming before it arrives.

GracePoint Solutions builds warehouse management software for charitable organizations specifically designed for this problem — real-time inventory visibility across networked distribution sites, deployable in under 30 minutes, with no IT team required. If your organization manages GIK donation distribution and wants to understand what that looks like in practice, we'd welcome the conversation.

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Sources: Good360 Maui Wildfire Relief; FreightWaves, "Maui warehouses, DCs overflowing with donations" (Aug. 2023); Good360, "Avoiding the Second Disaster"; research cited in The Charity Hub, "Why Your Disaster Donations Are Making Things Worse"; ALAN, "The Maui Wildfires: A Whole Community Approach in Moving Donations."