⛴Supply chains

the Kanto corridor under a Monday arrival, the Great-Lakes freight lanes under the weekend rain, and two Vietnamese logistics regions flooded at once

The exposure is concentrated where a single day of disruption is expensive. Kanto on Monday is the densest rail-and-road freight geography in Japan taking a typhoon's rain, on a holiday when the network is already running a different timetable — the cheap move is to reschedule Monday's inland legs now and let the holiday absorb it. In the American Midwest and Great Lakes, heavy rain rides east into the Mid-Atlantic and North-east on Sunday across the corridors that feed the eastern distribution centres; it is a delay-and-detour day rather than a damage day, provided the crossings are managed. Vietnam is the harder one: the north is still flooded with more than 1,000 households isolated and roads out, while the south takes 10 to 20 cm on Ho Chi Minh City through about Sep 24 — two ends of one logistics network degraded simultaneously, which is not how contingency plans are usually written. And on the Rio Grande do Sul coast, winds to 100 km/h with hail is a port-and-yard call for Sep 19 into Sep 20. Who owns it: a planner choosing between a detour cost today and a stranded load tomorrow.

carried on 42 of the last 65 editions — since Jul 5, the 10 most recent shown.