A warehouse is a storage and coordination site where incoming goods are received, sorted, held, and redistributed during disaster response [@wachtendorf2010; @watters2014].
Within emergent disaster response, the term matters because donated and converged materials become useful only if there is a place where they can be made legible and movable. Warehouses are therefore not merely storage containers. They are operational sites where classification, prioritization, and routing occur.
A warehouse can be temporary, improvised, or embedded inside a larger mutual aid hub. What defines it is its function in the logistics chain, not whether it looks like a formal facility.
Related terms
- Resource Cataloging - the practice that makes stored goods legible and retrievable
- Dispatch - the coordination practice that moves goods out of storage toward need
- Supply Sorting and Resource Routing in Emergent Disaster Response - a wider text on the logistics problem warehouses help solve