Presented at Western Decision Sciences Institute (WDSI 2012) conference April 5 - 8, 2011The unpredictability of the timing of a disaster as well as the scope of its human and material destruction raises several serious questions for emergency planners and first responders. Decisions regarding the types of provisions that should be prepositioned, as well as their location, should be made well before a disaster strikes in order to provide quick response. We discuss a general framework for classifying disasters and then investigate several logistics policy options for effectively responding to them. The conceptual models developed in this work will serve as the theoretical base for future empirical work investigating appropriate policy options for different classifications of disasters
