Priority given to injured, women, children in evacuation of Canadians from Haiti

The first wave of Canadian evacuees from Haiti was expected to arrive early Friday morning as their families anxiously waited for their loved ones to arrived.

That first planeload of 100 Canadians was scheduled to arrive at Montreal’s Trudeau airport late Thursday night, but officials later estimated the plane would not arrive until after midnight eastern time.

It was a long night for Nancy Savage who waited anxiously for news on when her husband Martin Turgeon would arrive.

She said he had called her from a U.S. Military base in Florida where injured were being taken off before the flight resumed to Montreal.

“He says he’s fine. He’s healthy, he’s extremely tired.”

Her husband arrived in Haiti and was on the phone to her when the quake struck.

“He called right after the first shock and was talking to me when the second shock happened,” Savage said.

Turgeon made it out of the hotel with seconds to spare before it collapsed, she said.

Afterward “he kept himself busy working alongside the rescue workers,” she said.

Savage was looking forward to his arrival.

“The minutes have been long but I feel I’m extremely lucky to have talked to him,” she said.

Priority in the repatriation effort was being given to injured people, women, and children, with Canadian diplomats working frantically in Port-au-Prince to assess the most urgent cases.

“The people that are coming in . . . are people who have been identified as the ones most in need by our officials,” said Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon Thursday.

“(These are) Canadians that are injured, Canadians in need of assistance, women, children, those who would normally be expected to be taken out (first).”

The evacuees were selected by staff at the Canadian embassy, which Cannon said remains functional despite sustaining damage in this week’s earthquake.

Cannon made the comments after a meeting with Haitian community members in Montreal North.

The evacuees are being whisked out of Haiti on the same military aircraft that carried Canadian soldiers into the disaster zone.

The Canadian evacuees have already left Haiti in the Hercules aircraft, and are returning home via the Dominican Republic.

The aircraft originally transported a 20-member reconnaissance unit from the military’s Disaster Assistance Response Team, along with civilian federal officials.

They left to perform a scouting mission before other Canadian soldiers could following them into Haiti.

Several federal officials plan to meet the evacuees at the Montreal airport.