Hurricane Season Is the Supply Chain Test Most Companies Fail on Paper

Aerial view of a shipping port with hurricane clouds gathering overhead, representing supply chain risk exposure

Most operations teams keep a contingency plan in a shared drive somewhere. Few open it again after the day it gets approved.

That gap creates a dangerous kind of comfort. Many executive teams assume that because they have not lived through a catastrophic interruption recently, their planning must be adequate. Absence of a recent crisis gets mistaken for evidence of readiness, when it is usually just evidence of luck.

Peak Atlantic hurricane season runs through October, and the storms that form in the coming weeks will do more than test coastlines. They will run a supply chain test against every contingency document sitting untouched since last year's sign off, and most of those documents will not survive it.

The plan itself is rarely the weak point. Someone identifies the likely risks, departments contribute their responsibilities, alternative suppliers get a brief mention, and leadership signs off. The document then waits in a shared drive for an emergency everyone hopes never arrives. People change roles. Suppliers merge. Routes shift. The organization still has a plan. It simply no longer has the plan it believes it has.

The Gap Between a Plan and a Drill

A plan is not a capability. A plan tells you what should happen. A drill tells you what actually will.

BSI, the standards and resilience body, found in its MESH Supply Chain Resilience Report 2025: Building Trust and Continuity Through Supply Chain Maturity that 54% of surveyed organizations had experienced a material supply chain disruption in the past year, yet fewer than 40 percent had updated or tested their business continuity plans in that same window.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office reaches a similar conclusion. Its Disaster Resilience Framework organizes federal disaster preparedness around three pillars, Information, Integration, and Incentives, built on the premise that resilience depends on continuously assessing real conditions rather than filing a document once and revisiting it on schedule. The logic scales down to a single operating model without modification.

McKinsey, in its Supply Chain Risk Pulse 2025: Tariffs Reshuffle Global Trade Priorities survey of 100 global supply chain leaders, found that 95 percent of companies now have visibility into their tier one supplier risk. Push one layer deeper and that visibility drops to just 42 percent. Most companies can see the supplier standing directly in front of them. Almost none of them can see the suppliers standing behind that supplier.

Visibility is not a dashboard problem. It is a discipline problem, and most companies have not built it.

The Illusion of Diversification

A standard supply chain risk assessment treats geographic and vendor diversity as a settled defense. Sourcing from three suppliers spread across three states reads as sound risk management on a slide, until someone actually maps the locations. Two of those three suppliers sit in neighboring industrial parks, draw power from the same regional grid, and ship through the same port. The organization believed it had reduced risk. It had simply duplicated exposure and given it a different vendor name.

Hurricane Helene made this concrete in September 2024. Floodwater damaged Baxter International's North Cove manufacturing facility in Marion, North Carolina, a single site responsible for roughly 60 percent of the country's sterile IV fluid supply, according to Healthcare Purchasing News. Hospitals nationwide rationed IV fluids and postponed elective surgeries. Shortages hit 23 separate fluid products before the dust settled, according to reporting in AAMI News. The FDA cleared emergency imports from Baxter facilities in Canada, Ireland, China, the United Kingdom, Mexico, and Spain, and full recovery took until February 2025.

This was not the first time. Seven years earlier, Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico and knocked out power to an island hosting roughly 50 pharmaceutical plants and 30 medical device facilities, producing close to 10 percent of the country's prescription drug supply. The resulting blackout became the longest in U.S. history. The FDA tracked 40 high-priority drugs at risk of running out and approved emergency imports from Europe, Asia, and Latin America, according to FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb's public statement on the shortages, a response that took months to stabilize.

Two hurricanes, seven years apart, the same underlying failure. Geographic concentration hid inside a supply chain that looked diversified on every vendor list anyone had reviewed. I've watched leadership teams learn, mid-crisis, that a supplier they listed as a backup shares a substation, a port, or a highway corridor with their primary vendor. The org chart says redundant. The map says exposed, and a real supply chain test would have caught it months earlier. A mid-market manufacturer with three contract assembly partners scattered across the Gulf Coast carries the same risk Baxter did, just smaller and with less public attention when it fails. The industry changes. The failure pattern does not.

What an Actual Supply Chain Test Requires

A real test does not ask whether the plan exists. It asks whether the people who would execute it know their part without opening the document.

A genuine stress test includes:

• A live simulation where named decision makers actually decide under a compressed timeline, not a read-through of the plan in a conference room

• Physical mapping of every "backup" supplier against the primary, checking shared regions, ports, power grids, and single points of failure that spreadsheets tend to hide

• A dollar figure attached to every day of disruption for the three most critical inputs, updated annually as volumes and costs shift

• Clear authority assigned in advance for who can activate emergency sourcing or approve premium freight without waiting on a signature chain built for calm weather

That last one gets skipped constantly. Companies build excellent technical contingency plans and then leave the actual decision rights ambiguous, which means the plan sits unused at the exact moment speed matters most.

NOAA's Climate Prediction Center issued its 2026 Atlantic outlook calling for a below normal season, with 8 to 14 named storms and one to three expected to reach major hurricane strength. Below normal is not the same as safe. National Weather Service Director Ken Graham said it directly at the outlook's release: "It only takes one storm to make for a very bad season."

The Exercise That Actually Exposes the Gaps

One of the more useful exercises an executive team can run costs almost nothing. Gather leaders from operations, procurement, finance, technology, customer service, and logistics in one room. Present a realistic scenario. A major hurricane has closed a regional port, and key shipments will not arrive for ten days.

Then ask questions and refuse to let anyone answer from memory. Who actually contacts the suppliers, by name, right now? Who informs customers, and with what message? Who approves emergency spending above the normal threshold? Require participants to locate the real procedures, and where it makes sense, contact the real people involved. The small delays that surface during an exercise like this expose the gaps that would otherwise become major failures, and they cost a morning instead of a quarter.

From Annual Ritual to Standing Discipline

The companies that handle hurricane season well have generally stopped treating it as a hurricane problem, folding it instead into a broader resilience practice tested against multiple risk types, not just one storm category.

The World Economic Forum's Global Risks Report 2025 ranked extreme weather events as the single most severe risk facing the world over the next decade, and the second most severe over the next two years, not a fringe concern buried in an appendix but the top of how the world's risk professionals rank what could go wrong.

McKinsey's same 2025 survey found supply chain leaders responding to this year's tariff pressure with the identical playbook applied to every other wave of disruption since 2020, increasing buffer inventory, dual sourcing critical components, and near-shoring the most exposed inputs. The trigger changes year to year. The response toolkit does not.

The discipline separating the fastest-recovering organizations from everyone else usually includes mapping second and third tier suppliers instead of stopping at direct vendors, testing alternate logistics routes under realistic conditions, and updating supplier and emergency contact information throughout the year instead of during one annual review. None of it requires a hurricane warning. It requires leadership willing to hear bad news early.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, put the underlying discipline plainly: "Invest in preparedness, not in prediction." The forecast was never the plan.

Ask One Question Before the Season Ends

Peak Atlantic hurricane season will eventually pass. Another disruption will replace it. The specific event matters less than the organization's readiness when it arrives.

Before the calendar turns, gather the leadership team and ask one question. If the biggest supplier disappeared tomorrow morning, would the contingency plan guide the first seventy-two hours, or would someone start writing a new plan under pressure?

Margaret Wheatley, in Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future, wrote that "there is no power for change greater than a community discovering what it cares about." Organizations that genuinely care about resilience do not wait for a disruption to reveal what should have been tested months earlier.

ACG Helps Executive Teams Pressure Test What They Have

Every operations leader believes their contingency plan works until the moment someone actually calls on it. That gap between confidence and capability is where Aspirations Consulting Group does some of its most consequential work, pressure testing resilience plans against the specific single points of failure a network is hiding. If your last stress test happened somewhere other than a live exercise, that gap deserves a closer look before the next storm forms. We welcome a confidential conversation at www.aspirations-group.com.

Keep This Kind of Thinking Coming Your Way

Today's edition is one of five published each week to more than 10 million current and aspiring executives who would rather test their assumptions before a crisis does it for them. Request a complimentary subscription to ACG Strategic Insights at www.aspirations-group.com/subscription.

Thanks for reading!

~ Jerry Justice

Living to Serve, Serving to Lead™