Huffington Post Green Bus to the Rescue:
By Jennifer Grayson
Next Tuesday, it will have been one year since the monstrous Hurricane Sandy struck the East Coast, killing 117 people in the U.S., destroying thousands of homes and wreaking $65 billion in damage. And while this year's hurricane season has been thankfully quiet so far, it does have some now questioning global warming's role in all of this; that is, whether climate change will actually increase, or decrease, the likelihood of Superstorm Sandy-type storms.
Enter Veterans Green Bus. Started by Gordon Soderberg, a U.S. Navy veteran with over 30 years of disaster response experience, his Crown Coach conversion can run 3,500 miles on a single fill-up of biodiesel or waste veggie oil (WVO, not to be confused with EVOO) and is equipped with solar windows that power its refrigeration. In the works: A satellite internet system that can run through the evening via solar-charged batteries.
Conceived by Soderberg while serving as a volunteer post-Hurricane Katrina (he built a small-scale biodiesel plant there to run equipment to keep lots cleared), the bus was purchased in 2010 and deployed for the first time during Hurricane Sandy at the behest of veterans service organization Team Rubicon, for which Soderberg served as a volunteer.
For the response to Sandy, the Green Bus (lovingly nicknamed Large Marge) transported volunteers to Rockaway Beach, Queens from Detroit and Chicago, as well as delivered much-needed tool donations from Home Depot. And while the bus may have appeared stripped down, the work inside was high-tech. In Rockaway, volunteer veterans used military grade geo-mapping and analysis software to assess Sandy's damage and keep track of the relief efforts.
Soderberg and the Green Bus also worked alongside FEMA, the Red Cross, and other government aid and nonprofit agencies, powering communication equipment and serving as office space for logistical staff -- most notably hosting former President Clinton for a briefing.
Those bigger organizations, however, seem to have missed out on something obvious to Soderberg: That a huge portion of any organization's disaster relief budget is spent (nay, wasted) on fuel. Fuel to transport volunteers to the disaster site and truck in supplies, fuel to run Bobcats to clear debris, fuel to run the generators. With diesel fuel close to $4 a gallon, those costs add up pretty quickly. "In the 30 years I've done disaster relief, I've never seen a fuel company donate fuel," Soderberg quips.
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The story keeps going....
We just received an invitation to the White House
Thu Oct 24, 2013 at 7:07 AM PT: Whatever or wherever this HR button is I don't know how to change it. If Dailkos puts a button that I can hit that will cause such a problem with members that I get band from DK, I have to ask WHAT THE FUCK IS THE BUTTON FOR?