If you’ve been listening since our very first episode, you may remember the story of the two guys in Nebraska, Kyle Simpson and Gayland Stouffer.
They’d spent most of the weekend dealing with flood damage from a bomb cyclone, and were walking back to their car when they came across a refrigerator stocked with ice cold beer.
“A gift from the heavens,” they called it.
The two men each drank a beer – “delicious,” Simpson said at the time – and they posted the story of the magic fridge online, where Brian Healy saw it and realized that the fridge was from his family’s cabin.
The Lincoln Journal Star has been following their story and the stories of those affected by the flooding all year long, and they checked back in with the men who found that beer fridge, Simpson and Stouffer, as well as its owner, Brian Healy.
As of this fall, they were all still rebuilding their properties from the flood damage, a long and expensive process.
And yet, Simpson said, as bad as he was hit, he was looking on the bright side, since other people were hit even harder than he was.
Simpson said he was still getting recognized around the state for all the interviews he did about the fridge.
Healy said he thinks the story stuck with people because it was a moment of goodness in a difficult time, the kind you might raise a glass to.
As for the fridge, it was returned to Healy’s family, just as Simpson said it would be.
Though Healy said his taste test didn’t go as well as the one Simpson and Stouffer had.
“I tried a beer,” he said, “but it was pretty skunky.”
There are lots of projects these days that fuel cars with something other than gasoline, from electrics to hydrogen fuel cells to engines that can run on used vegetable oil.
The Telegraph in the UK wrote recently about Prince Charles, a big champion of green technology, and how he got the engineers at Aston Martin to make his car run on surplus wine.
He said it’s not only more eco-friendly than gas, “it smells delicious as you’re driving along.”
Viral and vital: The Nebraska beer fridge that survived a fire, flood and found worldwide fame (Lincoln Journal-Star)
How Charles forced Aston Martin to make his car run on wine, and the Royal Train on cooking oil (Telegraph)
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