Northland Red Cross volunteers helping in Christchurch and Solomon Islands

Northland Red Cross volunteers from left, Donna Collins, Victoria Randall and Steve Harwood have set off on another disaster welfare deployment. PHOTO/JOHN STONE PHOTO/JOHN STONE

Northland Red Cross volunteers Steve Harwood and Victoria Randall have joined hundreds helping out with disaster relief work in Christchurch following this week's earthquake.

The Whangarei couple are not new to disaster welfare work since they joined Red Cross Northland about five years ago, having being deployed to the floods in Whanganui mid last year.

Two Northland Civil Defence workers, Susan Botting and Kim Abbott, are already helping out in Wellington and Christchurch respectively.

For Ms Randall, this would be her third deployment to Christchurch after helping out after the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes and she said she looked forward to doing her bit for the community.

"We train a lot in these areas so it's good to be able to put all that into practice. Red Cross is constantly looking for new people to join and help out and hopefully people out there do come forward," the Whangarei mum said.

Both are involved in tasks such as delivery of relief supplies and managing civil defence centres. They flew out of Whangarei yesterday for a five-day deployment.

Mr Harwood, a pest control technician, is the team leader and Ms Randall, the civil defence emergency management officer in Whangarei, his deputy, and they thanked their employers for allowing them to go at short notice.

Northland Red Cross has also sent another volunteer to a different mission.

Donna Collins also flew out yesterday to the Solomon Islands to carry out prevention programmes after an outbreak of dengue fever.

The registered women's health nurse and midwife said her work would be challenging because she would not only try and prevent the spread of dengue fever but would have to protect herself from contracting the killer virus. The outbreak started in October and is mostly concentrated in the capital Honiara and on Guadalcanal.

She was part of the New Zealand Red Cross Disaster Response Team sent to Nepal in May last year to assess health of communities affected by the first earthquake, which claimed more than 4000 lives. In 2014, the mother-of-four was deployed to help fight an outbreak of Ebola in the African nation of Sierra Leone

Red Cross Northland community services' manager Nancy Kareroa-Yorke said the organisation was thankful to the families and employers of the three volunteers for allowing them to respond so quickly.