The seven members of UCLA's Operation Haiti team are volunteering for two weeks aboard the USNS Comfort, a navy hospital ship rising 10 stories tall, stretching three football fields long, with beds for up to 1,000 patients.

 

The Comfort provides a mobile surgical hospital to the military, but also supports U.S. disaster-relief missions at home and around the world. The ship is normally stationed in Maryland, but shipped out to Manhattan after 9-11 and to Mississippi after Hurricaine Katrina in 2005. The Comfort also served in the Iraq war in the '90s and returned to the Middle East during Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2002-03.

 

When in Baltimore, Maryland, the Comfort normally stays in reduced operating status, manned by 76 civilian mariners and Navy medical personnel. When in peak service, the crew is nearly 1,300.

 

According to details provided by the Navy's Military Sealift Command, the Comfort boasts 12 operating rooms, with capabilties including orthopedics, neurosurgery, obstetrics and more. The ship also includes a dental suite, a physical therapy and burn care center, a pharmacy, a blood bank, a 2,500-capacity cafeteria, a "huge laundry" and even its own barber shop.