Sending Emergency Relief for Haiti

Published Wednesday, January 13th, 2010 in World Events

Samaritan’s Purse is sending a disaster assistance team to Haiti after the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere was rocked by one of the strongest earthquakes to hit the Caribbean in decades.

Samaritan’s Purse dispatched a team just hours after the quake to help with water, shelter, medical care, and other emergency needs. We will focus on medical help, shelter, clean water, and hygiene supplies.

An initial shipment of emergency relief items including rolls of plastic shelter material, hygiene kits, and water purification kits are being loaded onto a DC-3 cargo plane to fly to Port Au Prince Wednesday.

The massive 7.0 magnitude earthquake was the strongest to hit the country in 200 years and was felt as far away as Cuba. The tremor sparked widespread panic as it brought down buildings including the presidential palace, hotels, a hospital, and the UN headquarters in the capital of Haiti, Port-au-Prince

“It’s really a catastrophe of major proportions,” Haiti’s ambassador to the United States, Raymond Alcide Joseph, told CNN.

Thousands of people gathered in public squares late into the night, singing hymns and weeping. Many gravely injured people sat in the streets, pleading for doctors.

The death toll was expected to climb into the hundreds, but no official figure has been released so far.

“Everybody is just totally, totally freaked out and shaken,” Henry Bahn, a U.S. Department of Agriculture official visiting Haiti told the Associated Press. “The sky is just gray with dust.”

The earthquake was centered about 10 miles west of Port-au-Prince, the U.S. Geological Survey said. The quake was felt in the Dominican Republic, which shares a border with Haiti on the island of Hispaniola. Some panicked residents in the capital of Santo Domingo fled from their shaking homes.

(Source: Samaritans Purse)