Laurie R.P.N

I checked my email today and I was  and did

 add my name to the  tsunami help from nurses

. after talking to my fine husband I decided to

go for it and may be deployed to help with

 pride in 2 or 3 weeks,

here is the email I said yes to do I want to be

 a via nurse (volunteer immediate assistance)

I checked off yes to local via nurse and Tsunami

 help.I have worked in nursing for 29 yrs and

am ready to be deployed ".As you are no doubt

 aware, on December 26, a massive underwater

earthquake
off the cost of Indonesia triggered a tsunami that

devastated a ring of
countries in the region.
RNAO has been requested by the Ministry of

 Health and Long-Term Care to
coordinate a registry of volunteer nurses

 willing to be potentially
deployed to assist in the tsunami relief

effort.

RNAO will be utilizing VIANurse system as a

 vehicle to compile the

necessary contact information of volunteer

RNs and RPNs to assist in the

relief effort should this be necessary.

The most critical needs related to nursing skills

 at this time include;

languages specific to the regions affected,

 infection control and outbreak

management, public health and education.

 Should volunteer disaster relief

be requested deployment will be expected

to occur within two to three

weeks to allow for preparation activities,

 for example necessary vaccinations.

Please update your VIA Nurse profile with

 your current contact information

and skills and languages relevant

to the tsunami relief effort. To
indicate your willingness to volunteer for

Tsunami Relief, please login to

your VIA Nurse account at:and update

the "Custom Tag" section of your Personal

Data and Profile.

please do not hesitate to contact me directly

 with any questions.

Best Regards,

Tracey

VIANurse Coordinator

Registered Nurses Association of Ontario

Wow -- thanks for that post, both of them. Yeah, not just Oliphant, not just the Bruce, but as I said to May, you look at the animations on the WikiPedia page and just think, that's like if the explosion in Halifax knocked down buildings in Vancouver, that's a wall of water as tall as St.Francis Place and screaming along at the speed of a jumbo jet, it's a thousand jumbojets without landing gear. I've posted links to more background and sobering perspective on my personal blog.

May and I have a mutual friend with some aid workers currently in Sumatra where they have just shipped 160 tons of what they call The Bucket Brigade, small packages of tools for digging wells, bundled in a bucket. I've been online with our HK connection to lead them through setting up donation connections through PayPal (see the sidebar in my blog for details) ... but this thing isn't just going to go away, it's going to be with us with aftershocks for a long, long time.

Just for one small example, May learned today how people are mobilizing in HK to locate seniors who were dependent on their older kids for income, and as we all know, insurance companies don't pay for 7 years unless you can produce a body; sure there are immediate concerns and we shouldn't forget those, but there's going to be a need for vigilance for a long time to come.

Anyway, thanks again Laurie, and please please keep us posted on your progress (if you can't post to the SBP from Sumatra, email me or send me SMS and I'll post for you)

If any non-profit or educational agency relief projects in our area is in need of educational materials to illustrate the scope and scale of this disaster, I have obtained the tsunami2k4 file from the internet and will provide copies of this CD free of charge for these groups. The CD collects up many of the amateur and newswire digital video and photographs from Aceh, Thailand, Sri Lanka and Kenya, with some NASA simulations and other diagrams explaining the phenomenon; there is some footage that may not be suitable for small children, but this is all collected under one directory and easy to avoid in a presentation. The remaining footage is a pretty compelling record of just why this is not just any everyday natural disaster.

For example, the aerial photography cruising over what was once a city of 10,000, and now looks like soggy pasturelands; the voice-over explains that the faint white square marks in the puddles below are all that remains of the foundations of houses in what was once something a little bigger than Wiarton. What I personally find most compelling is how the water doesn't arrive like a Hollywood blockbuster in a dramatic apocalyptic wall of water, it just kind of gracefully wafts over the beach, deftly rising up and over the cars, buildings and trees.

Anyway, if any fundraising groups would like a copy, I'll gladly burn you one, and if anyone wants a copy for personal education use, I'll lend you a disk and you can burn one yourself.