Haiti: UK charity to send earthquake recovery aid team

A UK volunteer search and rescue team is preparing to fly to Haiti to offer humanitarian assistance following the earthquake that devastated the Caribbean nation over the weekend.

British charity Search And Rescue Assistance In Disasters (SARAID) said it had mobilised a team of six volunteers, including specialist structural engineers and paramedics, to travel to Haiti on Wednesday morning following a request from the Haitian ambassador in London.

More than 1,900 people were killed by Saturday’s 7.2 magnitude quake, with Haiti’s Civil Protection Agency on Tuesday raising the number of those injured to 9,900.

The SARAID team will be in the country for eight days to coordinate and lead structural damage assessments and also to provide technical search expertise to aid in rescue efforts.

They will also be on hand to train local engineers to enable them to continue the work over the length of the country’s recovery from the disaster.

A statement from the charity said: “The UN are currently reporting over 13,700 homes destroyed or damaged, around 30,000 people displaced from their homes and 7 hospitals severely damaged.

“As the window for survivor rescue draws to a close the search and rescue operations will move onto the damage assessment phase which aims at getting people back into their homes, back into their livelihoods and back to some sense of normality.”