The expression of a 31-year-old Haitian man, Ricot Duprevil, who miraculously pulled from rubble in Port-au-Prince Tuesday two weeks after the 7.0-magnitude earthquake leveled much of the city, almost suggested a beatific peace.

It is anyone’s guess how he managed to will himself the strength to survive, but if it was by any means to do with Buddhist karma then volunteers from the Northern California Chapter of Taiwanese Buddhist Tzu Chi Foundation might especially be feeling good.

In Chinese, “Tzu” means compassion and “Chi” means relief.

According to its Web site, the nonprofit organization has had volunteers and community networks on the ground in Port-au-Prince since 1998.

For the current crisis, it launched an emergency response targeting most of the affected areas of the city and displaced population in the neighboring areas, focused on food, clothing and health assistance to the community.

The organization is just one of several based in California that has been among those responding to the crisis in Haiti.

Another international agency based in the state helping with the relief effort is Operation USA, which helps communities at home and abroad by providing privately-funded relief, reconstruction and development aid.

Citing press materials, since 1979, Culver-City based OPUSA has worked in over 99 countries, delivering over $350 million for relief and development projects.

“Honeywell Hometown Solutions, the philanthropic arm of Honeywell, just made its business jet available for a second shipment of high-value antibiotics and medical personnel to Port-au-Prince tomorrow,” president and CEO Richard Walden told The Wave on Jan. 22. “Ball Corporation has offered a chartered plane which will leave Miami loaded with medical personnel and supplies on Tuesday and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries America Inc., has a cargo plane slated to leave this week filled with electric generators and light towers.”

Walden revealed that the organization is working closely with its local partners in Haiti, including St. Damien’s Pediatric Hospital/St. Luke’s Schools, L’Athletique d’Haiti, Partners in Health International Medical Corps and the Hands and Feet Project.

“As the rescue phase winds down and the bodies and injured are cared for, the second phase is about to begin,” said Walden. “Shelter, drinking water, food and power will have to be very rapidly restored to at least subsistence levels and this will be done by the U.S. military, the United Nations, Cuban health brigades and international non government agencies.”

However, an eye-opening insight into the work of expert rescue teams on the ground was provided by Los Angeles County Fire Inspector Matt Levesque. He revealed that a LAFD 72-member Heavy Rescue Task Force (HRT) arrived Jan. 14 to help find victims of the disaster. The team departed March Air Force Base in Moreno Valley just after 10 p.m. Jan. 13.

“The HRT can operate [in teams] independently or as one large group depending on the size of the incident,” said Levesque. “They were sent out two weeks ago with the job of search and rescue. Basically, they were to go down and search the buildings that were destroyed during the earthquake for live victims.”

Levesque said the specially trained unit consisted of county firefighters and paramedics rescue specialists, emergency room physicians, structural engineers, heavy equipment specialists, canine search dogs and handlers, hazardous material technicians and communications experts.

“All are members of Los Angeles County Fire with the exception of the three medical doctors who work in the surrounding county area,” he added.

The task force is actually part of the government’s Federal Emergency Management Agency, which has jurisdiction over the team while they are there.
Continued Levesque: “We keep a task force, set up by FEMA, on standby. So all the equipment they would need is located in our Pacoima warehouse. When they are called up they have six hours to respond and be pre-deployed so that logistically they are ready to go.

“All the equipment was loaded onto flatbed trucks and was taken to the Air Force base, where the team went through it before it was loaded onto to a C-117 transporter plane for a seven hour flight to Haiti.”

While they were on the ground in Haiti, Levesque further described what they would be doing.

“They would have a mission to go out and find buildings and do reconnaissance to really determine areas where they felt they would have the greatest degree of success,” he said. “Obviously once they located somebody they would use more of their heavy equipment, concrete gutting saws, lights, oxygen supplies, whatever they needed, to help in the rescue.”