Disaster relief nonprofit Team Rubicon is preparing to deploy a team of humanitarian aid volunteers to Jamaica in response to Hurricane Melissa, which made landfall near the town of New Hope, Jamaica, around 1 p.m. on October 28 as a Category 5 storm. Hurricane Melissa then churned across the island for nearly four hours before emerging near Falmouth on the north shore as a Category 4 Hurricane around 5 p.m. It is the strongest-ever storm on record to hit that Caribbean island nation.
Team Rubicon’s advance team will deploy to Jamaica on the first available route into the country to coordinate with local authorities and determine where Greyshirts can provide assistance, as well as set up logistics and coordination for a possible large-scale response.
Getting to Jamaica is a practice in strategy and alliances. While the nonprofit continually books commercial flights for its volunteers, unsurprisingly, those flights keep getting canceled. So, the organization is turning to other NGOs, aid organizations, and connections to find a way into the country. For humanitarian aid organizations, networking and relationships matter, explains Team Rubicon’s Deputy Director of Mission Support, Traci Rankin.
As the first wave of advance team volunteers heads for Jamaica, Team Rubicon’s EMT team is on standby, awaiting tasking from the Ministry of Health. The team comprises doctors, nurses, paramedics, and highly-trained support staff. Medical providers with training in emergency and trauma care, maternal and pediatric health, primary care, and endemic diseases can deploy as WHO-coordinated medical teams or to strengthen local hospital networks and partner organizations.
Also on standby are Team Rubicon’s WASH specialists, who can provide humanitarian aid for Hurricane Melissa by helping with stop-gap measures for clean water in Jamaica and reinstituting clean water and designing sanitation and hygiene procedures.
As of early October 29, 77% of the country was without electricity and about 700 water systems were down, according to Jamaica’s Information Minister, Dana Morris Dixon.
