(NECN: Lauren Collins, Manchester, NH) - More New Englanders are heading to Haiti to help earthquake victims. A pair of New Hampshire-based groups just left for the island nation to provide much needed medical care. "The situation seems to be dire down there," says Gaelle Simon who was born and raised in Port-Au-Prince, and now works with the Portsmouth, New Hampshire based Global Relief Technologies. She lost relatives in the quake. Her immediately family is OK, but "this morning I just got an email from somebody saying, 'Gaelle we have amputees, we're waiting for you to come, they need help.'" Simon's on a team from GRT that headed to Haiti Tuesday, along with Dennis Acton of New England Brace Company. "Many people were trapped in the rubble and had to have an appendage removed in order to get them out of the rubble," says Acton. "Others had to receive amputations due to infection to save them from gangrene." There an estimated 2,500 to 3,000 people who've lost a limb in or since the earthquake hit two weeks ago. Some are in rudimentary field hospitals; others have fled the chaotic capitol city. "But they're going to provinces such as Gonaïves, which were effected by the hurricanes that hit last year. So we don't know in what conditions they're actually going to be," says Simon. They'll be guided by the Port-Au-Prince based Healing Hands for Haiti, a group dedicated to medical care for the country's destitute handicapped whose facilities were destroyed in the quake. With satellite linked PDAs, the team will create a database of amputees. "We'll get their information, their personal information, where they can be found, and we'll take pictures of what their needs are, we'll send it up here so a company can fulfill those needs," says Adam Cote, Senior Vice President at Global Relief Technologies. This is just the first of what promises to be many missions to help Hatian amputees through the long recovery process. New limbs manufactured in the U.S. will be sent to Haiti, where patients will get fitted and begin rehab. "An amputee also needs lifelong care and lifelong treatment," says Acton. "So it's a big project." Simon notes, "I think we're going at a critical time, it's going to be very important for us to be able to follow up with these patients as to what kind of help we can provide."