Grim tasks await a small handful of Nevada County residents headed for earthquake-ruined Haiti.

The small Caribbean nation was left prostrate by a 7.0 earthquake that leveled the capital and wrecked the countryside Tuesday, and calls for help went out across the U.S.

Some, like Nevada County Sheriff's Office Search and Rescue liaison Gerald Weidler, answered and prepared to touch down in a nation already wracked by crime and poverty before the disaster.

The job of locating dead bodies in the rubble goes to Weidler, a south county resident, and his canine partner Ari, a 5-year old Slovakian shepherd.

The estimated death toll is already predicted to exceed 50,000, according to Associated Press.

“We've been told we're deploying to Haiti for 14 days,” Weidler said. “We're expected to be self-sufficient the whole time. That means all our of our own food, water filtration, everything.”

He's responding with the California Emergency Agency and is scheduled to deploy Saturday for southern Florida, where he'll catch a military flight for Port-au-Prince.

Pastor Tobey Nelson, a Nevada City resident, already will be on the ground when Weidler arrives. Nelson serves as a chaplain for the Grass Valley Police Department and Nevada County Sheriff's Office.

As a chaplain attached to a 35-member FEMA medical team, Nelson is expected to arrive in Haiti today. About 10,000 patients will await his 35-member team.

“What I've been told is that there's no water, lots of violence and rubble everywhere,” Nelson said in a telephone interview from Atlanta, where he was awaiting a military flight Thursday afternoon. “We're going to be practicing austere medicine, which means we're trying to save lives with no electricity and poor sanitation.”

Nelson is a veteran of the disaster response to New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina.

‘A close call'

Relief supplies and emergency experts started pouring into Haiti from around the world Thursday, but aid groups said the challenge of helping Haiti's desperate quake survivors was enormous.

“It's chaos,” U.N. humanitarian spokeswoman Elisabeth Byrs told the Associated Press. “It's a logistical nightmare.”

Aid deliveries by ship are impossible to Port-au-Prince's ruined port facilities. The city's airport was open, but damaged, laboring mightily to handle a flurry of incoming aid flights.

Haiti is an unpleasant place on its best days, said Jim Henderson, a Grass Valley resident who operates a medical clinic there with a few other area residents.

The Western Hemisphere's poorest nation features an economy that operates from sidewalks; if they are covered with rubble, the exchange of goods can be halted, Henderson said.

“Most people are unemployed and live on only a meal per day,” Henderson added. “It's incredibly poor.”

By a stroke of good luck, a bill inspired by Henderson hit the California Assembly floor Tuesday, causing him to cancel a pre-planned trip to Port-au-Prince, the country's capitol.

“It was a close call. We could have been killed,” Henderson said. “So this is very personal to us.”

Calls to staff at the clinic haven't gone through, and Henderson said he hasn't been able to contact a number of friends who live in Haiti.

His nonprofit organization, the Council of Religious and Civil Liberties, mobilized a medical team to respond to the country from the neighboring Dominican Republic Thursday.

“They are expecting to go into a bad environment: A lot of amputations from all the people mangled by the earthquake,” Henderson said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report. To contact Staff Writer Kyle Magin, e-mail kmagin@theunion.com or call (530) 477-4239.