As Hurricane Ian started pummeling the Southwest Florida area last week, emergency response teams from Direct Relief were organizing and getting ready to assist. The latest hurricane to hit the United States is considered to be the deadliest to hit Florida since 1935.
Direct Relief is one organization currently coordinating multiple rapid response shipments of medical aid across the state, and will continue to respond to requests in the coming days and weeks. Since 1948, Direct Relief has worked to help people who confront enormous hardship to recover from disasters and improve the quality of their lives.
One part of what Direct Relief does is to respond to areas who are impacted by hurricanes and other disasters. They provide the staging of emergency medicine with health facilities to areas that have been impacted by disaster.
One of the things that Direct Relief staff did to help after Hurricane Ian in Florida was to visit the Neighborhood Health Clinic in Naples, a free clinic providing medical and dental services to low-income uninsured workers in Collier County. The clinic there had not sustained any major damage, and had already had in place a generator provided by Direct Relief several years ago. This generator was used to power the building in order to keep insulin, vaccines, and other medicines at a safe temperature after the power outage.
Personal care packs from Direct Relief were able to be given to displaced people in the area. It is estimated that the Naples area may be out of power for a month or longer. There have also been high numbers of requests for backup power from people displaced from their homes.
Nineteen shipments of medical aid were ready to ship from Direct Relief’s warehouse. Direct Relief also distributed hurricane preparedness packs in Georgia, South Carolina, and across the U.S. Gulf Coast.
They have been in direct contact with other organizations assisting in those areas and are ready to deploy additional medicines, supplies, and backup power if needed. There are a multitude of great organizations helping in the disaster relief with the latest hurricane, but Direct Relief is one of the oldest and most established one of the group.