Call him Noah, as in Noah’s Ark.
Tony Alsup, a truck driver from Tennessee, got a bus and drove down to the hurricane zone to pick up critters.
He had heard the shelters were full so he wanted to mount a similar rescue mission as the one he had done last year when Hurricane Harvey stormed through the Texas coast.
Alsup, who wants to open his own animal shelter one day, has been rescuing shelter pets from floodwaters with his school bus since Hurricane Harvey ravaged the Texas coast last year.
When Alsup saw on the news how numerous animal shelters had become overcrowded with lost or rescued animals, he thought he could help. He wanted to help transport the animals to vacant shelters — but he knew he couldn’t put them in a semitrailer.
“I thought, well what can I do?” he said. “I’ll just go buy a bus.”
He’s been posting updates on Facebook.
Good morning everyone!
We were extremely busy yesterday and today is about to be as well but WE LOVE IT!!!
The team of volunteers was able to rest all of the fur babies and the bus will be getting a much needed generator and AIR CONDITIONER TODAY 😍😍😍😍😍 THANK YOU BRUNO FOUNDATIONWe are looking for FOSTERS all Across America please PM me if you can help and someone WILL get back you.
He has since helped with rescues during Hurricanes Irma and Maria (no bus for the latter; he was feeding horses) and now during Florence.
Last Monday, when Alsup began his latest rescues, the kennels in his vehicle were stacked from floor to ceiling. Pet food, water bowls, leashes and toys were strewn about the aisle. But as he rolled along his route, Alsup kept telling his Facebook followers that he had room for more, asking them to point him to where pets needed help.
“NO ONE LEFT BEHIND,” he wrote in one Facebook post, before signing off with his standard line, “Love y’all, mean it.”
In less than 48 hours, he stopped at the Humane Society of North Myrtle Beach (S.C.), the Dillon County (S.C.) Animal Shelter, another in Orangeburg, S.C., and Saint Frances Animal Center in Georgetown, S.C., which sang his praises on social media Sunday.
In a Facebook post late Sunday, the Saint Frances Animal Center said that Alsup was rescuing all the “leftover” pets — the dogs and cats the shelter couldn’t seem to hand off to anyone else.
“It’s all true. Tony swooped in at 4am Wednesday morning to pick up our ‘leftovers’ — the dogs with blocky heads, the ones with heartworm,” the center wrote on Facebook. “The ones no one else will ever take. And he got them to safety. Not the most conventional evacuation, but surely the one with the most heart.”
Alsup drove to Foley, Ala., where his friend, Angela Eib-Maddux, opened her privately run dog shelter to the new arrivals for the night. She gave them baths and fluffy blankets and “spa treatment,” Alsup said, until they could find enough shelters or foster homes for the animals.
