Santa Rosa prosthetics lab to aid amputees in Haiti

<p>Two steel shipping containers at a Santa Rosa industrial yard soon will be en route to Haiti, bringing help for some of the thousands of amputees in the earthquake-ravaged Caribbean nation.</p><p>The containers, packed with $75,000 worth of tools and equipment, will house a complete prosthetics laboratory on the grounds of Port-au-Prince's Adventist Hospital that will manufacture artificial limbs made mostly of plastic to withstand the island's humid climate.</p><p>Jon Batzdorff, a Santa Rosa prosthetist, is coordinating the relief mission with a handful of other volunteers.</p><p>There are only three prosthetics workshops in the teeming Port-au-Prince area shattered by the Jan. 12 quake that killed about 200,000 and left more than 1 million people homeless.</p><p>Art Forman, a retired prosthetist from Las Vegas, visited the Haitian capital in March to assess the demand for artificial limbs. </p><p>“The need was terrible before (the earthquake),” Forman said Tuesday at the Dutton Avenue yard where Batzdorff's twin containers are being outfitted.</p><p>Impoverished Haiti, long considered too unstable and corrupt for much outside humanitarian assistance, had about 25,000 amputees prior to the temblor, said Forman, who served on three previous prosthetics missions there.</p><p>About 5,000 more islanders lost limbs to crushing injuries in the quake, he estimated.</p><p>Other volunteer prosthetics labs are gearing up to go to Haiti, but there is no likelihood of exceeding the need, Forman said.</p><p>Batzdorff, owner of Sierra Orthopedic Laboratory on Montgomery Drive, said he will arrive in Haiti with enough material to make 100 artificial legs, which “will keep us plenty busy.”</p><p>Forman and another volunteer prosthetist, Arnie Lund of Colfax, were testing Batzdorff's equipment on Tuesday, wrapping a heated sheet of dark brown plastic around the plaster mold of a surgically abbreviated leg.</p><p>The molded plastic forms the socket, where an amputee's leg attaches to the prosthesis, Forman said. The prosthesis “could be made of diamonds,” he said, but if the socket fits poorly the device “is junk.”</p><p>Batzdorff said he's taking dark brown plastic to Haiti to more closely match the amputees' skin color. The project will buy more material after it determines what's appropriate for the mission, he said.</p><p>On May 18, a flatbed truck will pick up both containers and haul them to Miami, where a barge will complete the two-week trip to Haiti.</p><p>Batzdorff and Lund will set up the lab, along with Wayne Wendell, a retired Santa Rosa engineer who also does welding.</p><p>“I'm retired,” said Lund, who taught prosthetics in Kenya with the Peace Corps in 1973. “There's a big need and we have a little bit of help we can offer.”</p><p>Batzdorff and Forman are both veterans of numerous prosthetics missions around the world.</p><p>More than $100,000 in donations to ProsthetiKa<NO1>cq<NO>, the nonprofit Batzdorff founded five years ago, will get the lab to Haiti. Additional funding will keep it running, he said.</p>