Tony Alsup didn’t wait around.
This 51-year-old truck driver from Greenback, Tennessee, bought a school bus for 3.200 dollars, ripped out the seats and filled it with cages. On the side, he wrote “Emergency Animal Rescue Shelter”. When Hurricane Florence was approaching the East Coast of the United States in September 2018, he left home with a single goal: get there before the water.
He traveled to overwhelmed shelters in North Myrtle Beach, Dillon, Georgetown, and Orangeburg, South Carolina, just hours before the storm. He took 53 dogs and 11 cats, 64 lives in all.
But he wasn’t looking for the easiest animals to adopt. He focused especially on large dogs, the less “appealing” ones, the ones almost nobody wanted. His motto was simple: “No one gets left behind”. He even promised to pay for the fuel, or even a boat, as long as it meant getting them out of there.
He took them to a private shelter in Foley, Alabama, where they received baths, blankets, and their first care.
And it wasn’t his first mission. He had already used his bus to rescue animals during Harvey, Irma, and Maria. For Tony, that yellow vehicle had become a kind of Noah’s Ark on wheels.