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Fairfield County-Based AmeriCares Sends Team To Oklahoma After Tornado

STAMFORD, Conn. -- A disaster relief team from AmeriCares is headed to Oklahoma, which was devastated by a mile-wide tornado Monday, the Stamford-based relief group announced on its website

The team will begin to coordinate deliveries of emergency aid for victims of the disaster even as search-and-rescue operations continue, the humanitarian group said. As many as 24 people were feared killed in the tornado.

"The early hours of an emergency are the most critical,” Garrett Ingoglia, an AmeriCares vice president of emergency response, said in a statement. “We keep a stock of targeted medicines, family emergency kits and relief supplies on hand to help partner clinics in disaster-prone areas, so we are ready to respond quickly.”

AmeriCares said it will work with a network of free clinics and community health centers in Oklahoma along with shelters and other nonprofit organizations to help injured and displaced victims with deliveries of acute and chronic care medicines and relief supplies. The group is working with Stamford-based Nestlé Waters North America and Feeding America to take bottled water to food banks to support displaced people and first responders.

The death toll continues to mount from the twister, which flattened hundreds of homes and buildings, and damaged hundreds more, including an elementary school and a medical center. A state of emergency has been declared, the Oklahoma National Guard has been deployed. 

AmeriCares is a nonprofit global health and disaster relief organization that delivers medicines, medical supplies and aid to people in need around the world and across the United States. Since it was established in 1982, AmeriCares has distributed more than $11 billion in humanitarian aid to 164 countries.

To make a donation to help the work of AmeriCares, visit its website

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