Sandy Emergency Response Expands as the Crisis Continues

As the East Coast struggles to recover from Hurricane Sandy and a powerful November 7 nor’easter, AmeriCares is expanding our emergency response to help more families in crisis. Our teams have been working nonstop to ease the  human suffering caused by power outages, cold weather, and flooding by filling urgent needs in clinics and shelters throughout the tri-state area.Our response to date includes:

• 35 shipments of medical and disaster aid sent to partners helping families who are displaced or without power.  The deliveries include 6,000 family emergency kits and personal hygiene kits, first aid kits, sleeping bags, blankets, flashlights, batteries, diapers, chronic care medicine, vaccines, household clean-up kits and 210,000 bottles of water.
• Deployment of the mobile medical clinic to care for patients in three locations in hard-hit Staten Island. The medical clinic is preparing to redeploy to help the Addabbo Family Health Center in Red Hook, Brooklyn provide care to a devastated community with huge unmet health care and humanitarian needs.
• On-site relief work by teams in Atlantic City, Red Hook, Brooklyn, New York City, Hoboken, NJ, Rockaway, Breezy Point, Staten Island and coastal Connecticut. As temperatures continue to drop, our teams are working with response organizations to deliver relief supplies, identify needs and award flash grants for the purchase of goods, medicines or services to meet the immediate needs of clinics and evacuation shelters.

A patient at our Mobile Medical Clinic in Staten Island gets a tetanus shot.AmeriCares 40-foot mobile clinic operated in two new locations in Staten Island on November 6, providing primary care and tetanus and flu vaccine to relief workers and residents in the borough. The fully-equipped bus arrived in Staten Island on Thursday, November 1—the first medical service to reach the hard-hit area—and has made provided service to a local clinic, emergency shelter, and aid distribution center.To help meet the tremendous need in Rockaway, Queens, we’re awarding a grant and delivering medicine to emergency service personnel in Breezy Point.Moving forward, we will continue to ship and distribute aid, monitor the needs of more than 100 partner clinics in stricken communities, focusing on three key areas:

• Evacuee assistance for displaced survivors.
• Restoration of health services in communities where access has been disrupted.
• Case management and mental health support to help survivors cope with stress and depression.