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"It's irresponsible to say, oh, 'We're going to go and just plop people down there,' " said Burger, the president of the California Nurses Association and a working nurse in Santa Rosa. "The reality is, I don't think most of our nurses have seen death and destruction outside of a hospital. They're used to seeing people die, but psychologically, it's different."
More than 4,000 nurses have already expressed their willingness to join the effort organized out of CNA's Oakland headquarters, and Burger is leading an advance team this weekend that will lay the groundwork. She is heading to Miami on Sunday to prepare a command center to train nurses and find out how many will be needed and when.
"We can't put the nurses on the ground without the support system and supplies from the outside," Burger said. "We can't count on any resources from the Haitian government because there really isn't one right now."
While the Bay Area, unlike East Coast cities such as Miami, is neither close to Haiti nor home to an especially large Haitian community, it is full of people who have pledged their willingness to help in the days since a massive
Emergency physician Hernando Garzon already left. The doctor, who splits his time between Kaiser hospitals in Oakland and Sacramento, is leading a small team for Los Angeles-based Relief International that will set up a mobile clinic in Port au Prince as early as today.
Many of Haiti's wounded remain untreated and hospitals have collapsed, leaving local medics unable to help.
"What we expect to see, even a week from now, are injuries that need to be stitched or broken bones," Garzon said. "We may be having to do more complex wound care and fracture repair than we would have if we'd seen (the patients) earlier."
Garzon was scheduled to fly from California to Miami on Thursday night and arrive to the capital of Port au Prince today, where his team is coordinating its efforts with the World Health Organization. He has experience responding to disasters, having previously traveled to Pakistan and Peru after devastating earthquakes in both countries, but he said this one is different.
"In Peru, the government and infrastructure were still in operation," he said. "I think things are more austere in Haiti."
About 100 local nurses crowded into CNA's Oakland office to participate in the national conference call Thursday; nurses across the country participated in the call.
"We've got 4,500 nurses and now and it's like a ticker, it just keeps going up and up every minute," said spokeswoman Liz Jacobs. How many of those nurses will end up in Haiti, however, remains unclear. Some may be deployed to Miami, where Haitians with serious wounds are being airlifted. Others might be asked to help out in the weeks and months to come.
"In the weeks and months following the disaster the kind of care that's needed is very much everyday care, and things are exacerbated by the lack of medication, basic first aid," Jacobs said. "Wounds fester and spread. Something that was preventable ends up a life-threatening situation."
As Bay Area medics and other emergency professionals planned ways to help, local Haitian immigrants also struggled over what to do as they mourned the loss of friends, relatives and members of their hometown communities.
Fredy Dorsainvil said he and his bandmates in the East Bay group Kalbass Kreyol said they are organizing a benefit concert at the Ashkenaz music club on San Pablo Avenue in Berkeley on Jan. 28.
"We are in the process of deciding right now what's the best (fundraising) channel that would impact people most directly," he said.
Other local Haitians, frustrated they still had no word from family members, said they were looking for ways to travel back home.
"We cannot just stay," said Oakland resident Paulette Galiothe, who has heard that at least a dozen members of her Haitian church have died. "We have to find what is going on."
Others said it was better to stay.
"I tell people that unless they have special skills -- doctors, nurses, firefighters -- they'll probably get in the way," said Max Blanchet, a retired Berkeley engineer who grew up in Haiti. "The best thing people can do is send money to certain serious organizations doing work there, such as Doctors Without Borders."
Blanchet learned Thursday that a cousin and his wife died as they were meeting with two French engineers at the offices of a Haitian engineering firm in the capital. The French visitors also died. Blanchet lost another cousin's son whose building collapsed while he was at work. He is waiting to hear from many more friends and relatives.
"In my view, tens of thousands died and we'll probably never end up with a firm count. Many people, especially more modest segments of society, don't have proper identification," he said. "It's a very grim scene."
Matt O'Brien covers demographics and immigration. Contact him at 925-977-8463.
How to donate to Haitian relief efforts:
