Roosevelt Island Resident And NYC Emergency Management Dep't CERT Volunteer Frank Farance Reports On Food Bagging Mission Which Became Rescue Mission Of Almost Quarter Million Pounds Of Food During Coronavirus Pandemic

Roosevelt Island resident Frank Farance is a long time volunteer with the NYC Emergency Management Department (NYCEM) Community Emergency Response Team (CERT). According to NYCEM

NYC CERT members are dedicated volunteers who undergo a training program that provides basic response skills needed for fire safety, light search and rescue, community disaster support, disaster medical operations, and traffic control.

The volunteer commitment is for at least one year of service following graduation....

Mr Farance shown in photo below on right with other CERT members shares these photos and reports on a recent CERT Food Bagging mission which turned into a Food Saving mission during the ongoing Coronavirus Pandemic. According to Mr Farance:

This Originally Started as a "Food Bagging" Operation

There are almost a dozen CDP (Commodity Distribution Point) operations around the City, which involve trucks/pallets of food (of various menu/packaging types) and an on-site partnership of the City's Parks Department, National Guard,

other City Agencies, and CERTs. This operation is different. The deployment request called it a Food Bagging operation, including separating food into compost, tossing stale food, and salvaging what we could from the boxes.

The operation was at Pier 36 (downtown on South Street) at Basketball City, which abuts the Department of Sanitation (DSNY) facility.

After scavenging for items in the 27,400 boxes (or as much as we could get through that day), the 274 pallets

were to be dumped as garbage at DSNY next door and sent out to garbage landfills.

How Big Is This?

There were 274 pallets (30+ pallets wide, 9 rows deep), with each pallet holding 100 boxes of food (6 meals/box), and each pallet weighing about 1000 pounds (1/2 ton) - that's about 274,000 pounds (1/4 million pounds), and about 164,400 meals. This filled half of Basketball City.

The Pipeline

CERTs led the organization of the space as we had prior experience in large warehouse operations (Hurricane Maria at the City's warehouse), so we arranged the pallets of the input queue on one side, the pipeline (4-6 people sorting food), and the output crates. The work is optimized so people don't have to move too far - either picking up food, or putting it in its sort container. We used smaller boxes for sorting at the pipeline, which were transferred to the crates. The smaller boxes would prevent crushing the food and prevent bulging at the bottom of the crates -- these were lessons learned from the large scale 2017 Hurricane Maria supplies lift. Pallet jacks were used continuously to keep all the work happening at a small space. Everything was very fluid: there weren't assigned roles per se, everyone was pitching in were help was needed, and we shifted positions as the situation demanded -- what a great team, everyone in good spirits and flexible!

"Hey, This Food Is Still Fresh"

After sorting through several hundred boxes of food,

it appears the food was OK. There weren't smelly rotten bananas, as promised. The apples were fine,

the prepackaged muffins were fine, and the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches were fine -- technically, they weren't sandwiches, they were four individually sealed pieces of bread plus sealed cups of peanut butter and jelly packets.

Redirecting the Operation: From Salvaging To Redistribution

Fortunately, a NYCEM logistician was on-site, she escalated the issue, and she got the operation changed: instead of getting the food prepped to put onto a barge enroute to the garbage dump, someone will be picking up the food and distributed directly to New Yorkers. Woo Hoo for NYCEM logistics!

Re-Palletizing Boxes of Food

Instead of throwing out the food, we now need to prepare the pallets so they can be shipped and distributed to the public. A good number of pallets required re-palletizing: pulling out the good boxes, and scavenging what we could from the damaged boxes. The new pallets were built up, then shrink-wrapped, and then moved into the output queue.

Shipping Out the Food

Trucks arrive to pick up the pallets for distribution. We optimized this: CERTs would assist with bringing the pallets to the truck

and loading them onto the Tommy Gate, the driver would lift the pallet and move it into the truck.

This made much more sense than having the driver come in, find a pallet and the load into the truck. With this optimization we could fill a truck in about 20 minutes - that would otherwise take about an hour. Optimizations like this greatly improve productivity because, in this part of the operations, the delivery truck is the most valuable resource as it is delivering food - and longer loading times ship less food per hour. A great lesson learned from these operations.

What A Great Team!

It was great to work with this team: everyone was enthused and creative, work was improvised and fluid. Most importantly, we all took great pride in rescuing 1/4 million pounds of food!

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