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Global Rescue interviewed by San Jose Mercury News

Three students back at UC Berkeley after Haiti ordeal.

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Three students back at UC Berkeley after Haiti ordeal

By Matt O’Brien
Contra Costa Times

Updated: 01/20/2010 04:04:56 PM PST
 

BERKELEY — After a tiny aircraft picked up two of them from a remote Haitian runway, all three of the UC Berkeley students stranded in the Caribbean nation after the Jan. 12 earthquake are now back on campus for the first week of the semester, university officials said Wednesday.

A private rescue team of military veterans says it traveled by air and land Sunday to retrieve two graduate students who were stuck in the southwestern port city of Les Cayes.

The town was far enough from the quake’s epicenter to not be severely damaged, but has become a refuge for Haitian evacuees fleeing the capital, Port-au-Prince.

“We were contacted by their insurer, who let us know they were potentially in harm’s way,” said Daniel Richards, director of Boston-based Global Rescue. “Many of the roads were impassable, and the security situation was deteriorating.”

The university said its risk management office was able to keep track of the students because one of them had signed up for the campus travel insurance plan before she left.

Richards said he sent a team by land and air to rescue the students. While the ground team left much earlier, a fixed-wing aircraft was able to be dispatched more quickly, landing on a small runway outside of town…