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By  Travis Gupton

The Selma Times-Journal

The Salvation Army and Maxwell Airforce Base teamed up to hand out food boxes at Wallace Community College on January 28

They served shelf-stable food that could last for several days. Cars lined up as boxes full of food and supplies loaded up in vehicles.

“We brought a little over 2,000 food boxes,” said William Trueblood, Emergency disaster services director for the Salvation Army’s Alabama Louisiana Mississippi Division. “It feels wonderful. Like we say in our department, we don’t like the fact that we have to do this, but we love the fact that we get to do this. From our perspective, what we notice that at an event like this, you get a lot of people offering support that were directly impacted by the event.

“But what you also see is that at the same time is that the people who are indirectly impacted. The power outages, and the people who lost their food. They don’t often get the same recognition because maybe their homes weren’t destroyed or damaged so it was important to get this food out here to people who may have lost their food when the power went out and when the fridges went out. That way it offsets some of their costs.”

The Senior NCO Academy at Maxwell Air Force Base volunteered to help hand out the food. Erin Lefever, a Volunteer Coordinator for the NCO Academy Flight, said that they had multiple reasons behind the flight volunteering.

“I feel like there is a couple of reasons there,” Lefever said. “One of the things that the Academy encourages us to do is to get out and volunteer while we are here in the local community. So we do have volunteer coordinators, like myself in each flight and we look for opportunities out in the local communities to do things and to give back where we can. Because of this situation here with the tornado in Selma, it was a no-brainer to come out here and do what we could to help”

Trueblood says that anyone wanting to support the effort to help can make a donation to the Salvation Army.

“If anyone wants to help with the cause or wants to be part of helping us they can go to helpsalvationarmy.org and they can select the Selma Tornado tab,” Trueblood said