Seven volunteers huddled around tables of bins filled with hygiene products Wednesday afternoon inside a warehouse on Pittsburgh’s North Side.

The volunteers formed an assembly line, packing flushable wipes, sanitizer packets, pads, tampons, deodorant, ChapStick, soap, shampoo, conditioner, toothbrushes, toothpaste, tissues and lotion into plastic bags, before placing them into brightly colored drawstring totes.

Around 9 a.m. Wednesday morning, 6,000 similar hygiene kits had been sent on a truck headed for Florida. From there, they were to be flown into Jamaica in the wake of one of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes on record.

Hurricane Melissa, a catastrophic Category 5 storm, made landfall on the island on Tuesday and has so far accounted for the deaths of dozens of people and left wi

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