Veterans who wish to continue serving have a new mission in front of them. The war on COVID-19.

The "Veterans Coalition for Vaccination" is using technology to help in the fight.

After Hurricane Delta hit Louisiana in the fall of 2020, Team Rubicon was there to help and rebuild.

“Team Rubicon is a disaster nonprofit that mobilizes military veterans to use their skills, experience, and education to help communities prepare, respond and recover from natural disasters," explained Art delaCruz, President and Chief Operating Officer of Team Rubicon.

Just like it is in the military, there's teamwork, a mission, and a goal.

“Military veterans bring immense experience and comfort in ambiguous environments that can help people that have been impacted by natural disasters," delaCruz said.

Formed by a former Marine sniper, Team Rubicon began with a small team of 8. There are now 140,000 volunteers who come together for a cause.

“It's another opportunity to continue to serve," delaCruz said.

Now, they have a new job.

“Veterans from across the country are coming together to aid in converting vaccines into vaccinations. Vaccines don’t save lives, vaccinations do," delaCruz said.

To say that mobilizing takes a huge amount of coordination would be an understatement. These days, that coordination comes through technology.

Justin Spelhaug is the Vice President of Technology for social impact at Microsoft, and he's a veteran who helps organizations like Team Rubicon run their operations with "Cloud for Nonprofit."

“Brings the best of our trusted cloud capabilities to solve the most challenging processes and pain points that nonprofits have," explained Spelhaug.

Things like fundraising, how to deploy volunteers, when and where and how to run programs. All of that, in one place. When it comes to something like Team Rubicon's Veterans Coalition for Vaccination, technology can streamline a big job.

“Ultimately these are really, typically, chaotic events, and the volunteer system helps provide order to what can be a chaotic event and help those health care workers get to the shots in the arms,” Spelhaug said.

He added they're using that tech to help mobilize in the most underserved of America's communities.

For Team Rubicon, it's all about supporting the health care system.

“We understood that our veterans could have impact it's not necessarily in putting needles in arms, it’s making sure we can facilitate this process so when doctors and nurses show up, that we’re vaccinating as many people as possible in a short amount of time," delaCruz said.

They've already started working in a handful of communities across the country and they're standing by, ready to deploy, when called.

From wildfires to hurricanes, natural disasters can destroy entire towns.

“We’re just putting structures in harm's way, and harm's way is becoming a broader and broader area,” the Director of the Cooperative Institute for Research and Environmental Sciences at CU Boulder, Waleed Abdalati, said.

Beachfront properties, cabins in the mountains, houses below sea level all exist in potentially risky areas.

“Who doesn't want to look at the ocean? So there's a lot of development right up to the edge of the water, and over time that edge of the water is creeping inward,” Abdalati said.

Sometimes where we build doesn't necessarily mean forever. In fact, more often than not, our homes and offices are in the path of potentially devastating natural disasters.

“57 percent of structures are in only 31 percent of the area which is these hazard hot spots,” Matthew Rossi, a research scientist at Earthlab at CU Boulder, said. He also was one of the authors of a new study looking at the risks of where we’ve developed over the years.

The study details the areas they investigated and the risks that exist in those spots.

“We were looking at using structure level data, so the building that is constructed in hazard hotspots, and asking 'Are we preferentially building in those places?'” Rossi explained.

The answer is yes. The study found growth rates in hotspots exceed the national trend.

“We actually are preferentially building in these hazardous zones,” he said.

They looked at earthquakes, wildfires, tornadoes, floods, and hurricane wind speeds. These are all events that Jeff Schlegelmilch with the National Center for Disaster Preparedness is familiar with.

“We have a lot of structures, a lot of aspects of modern society that are in harm's way,” Schlegelmilch said.

He said he sees an increase in the frequency of these disastrous events as well.

“Looking backward doesn't tell us everything we need to know moving forward. The kind of hazards we’re exposed to, the aging infrastructure we have, it's all entering into a changing world with more extreme events,” Schlegelmilch said. “If 2020 weren’t known for COVID, it would be known as another record-breaking year of billion-dollar weather-related disasters.”

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration keep data on the impact these events have.

From 1980 to 2021, floods cost an average of $3.6 billion a year, wildfires $2.5 billion. The average cost for all disasters every year is around $45.4 billion.

“You have the convergence of development, increased vulnerability from sinking land, and increased vulnerability from climate change,” Abdalati said. He’s been watching the earth change from space his entire career.

“We’re living in a changing world, we’re living in a changing environment, and that changing environment brings with it risk. And it’s critical for our success as a society that we understand those risks, and we do what we can to mitigate those risks,” he said.

For example, wildfires.

“We see increases in the number of fires over the last few decades, and we see increases in the areas burned by those fires,” he explained.

As we continue to develop land and experience a changing pattern of weather events, Schlegelmilch said it’s important that people stay informed of where they’re at and the risks they face.

“We have to prepare for a world where this is more normal, not more of an outlier, and prepare for those scenarios,” Schlegelmilch said.

“I think it actually helps local and regional planners to think about how they might reframe some of the questions they've always been asking when developing in hazardous zones,” Rossi said.

Content warning: Video above may be considered distressing

The director of an Israeli ambulance service has confirmed that nearly 40 people died in a stampede at a religious festival in northern Israel.

Eli Beer, director of Hatzalah, said he was shocked by the size of the crowd at the Lag BaOmer celebrations at Mount Meron. Police were quoted as saying some 100,000 people were there.

He told Army Radio that there were four to five times the number of people that should have entered a location like this. “Close to 40 people died as a result of this tragedy,” he said.

The stampede broke out early Friday at a Jewish religious gathering attended by tens of thousands of people in northern Israel, leaving 150 hospitalized, authorities said. Israeli media reported that as many as 44 people were killed and published photos of rows of bodies.

The disaster occurred at Mount Meron at the main celebrations of Lag BaOmer, a holiday when tens of thousands of people, mostly ultra-Orthodox Jews, gather to honor Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, a 2nd century sage and mystic who is buried there. Large crowds traditionally light bonfires, pray and dance as part of the celebrations.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it a “great tragedy,” and said everyone was praying for the victims.

The incident happened after midnight, and the cause of the stampede was not immediately clear. Videos circulating on social media showed large numbers of ultra-Orthodox Jews packed together in tight spaces.

A 24-year-old witness, identified only by his first name Dvir, told the Army Radio station that “masses of people were pushed into the same corner and a vortex was created.” He said a first row of people fell down, and then a second row, where he was standing, also began to fall down from the pressure of the stampede.

“I felt like I was about to die,” he said.

Zaki Heller, spokesman for the Magen David Adom rescue service, said 150 people had been hospitalized and confirmed there had been some deaths. Army Radio, citing anonymous medical officials, said the death toll had risen to 44.

Heller told the station “no one had ever dreamed” something like this could happen. “In one moment, we went from a happy event to an immense tragedy,” he said.

Photos from the scene showed rows of wrapped bodies.

The Israeli military said it had dispatched medics and search and rescue teams along with helicopters to assist with a “mass casualty incident" in the area. It did not provide details on the nature of the disaster.

It was the first huge religious gathering to be held legally since Israel lifted nearly all restrictions related to the coronavirus pandemic. The country has seen cases plummet since launching one of the world's most successful vaccination campaigns late last year.

Health authorities had nevertheless warned against holding such a large gathering.

But when the celebrations started, the Public Security Minister Amir Ohana, police chief Yaakov Shabtai and other top officials visited the event and met with police, who had deployed 5,000 extra forces to maintain order.

Ohana, a close ally of Netanyahu, thanked police for their hard work and dedication “for protecting the well-being and security for the many participants” as he wished the country a happy holiday.

Netanyahu is struggling to form a governing coalition ahead of a Tuesday deadline, and the national tragedy is sure to complicate those efforts.

At least two dead after small plane crashes into Mississippi home, police say

Updated: 4:01 AM EDT May 5, 2021

At least two people were killed when a small plane crashed into a Mississippi home late Tuesday, according to emergency officials.Authorities in Hattiesburg were called to the scene of the aircraft crash just before 11:30 p.m., Hattiesburg Police Public Information Officer Ryan Moore said.Two people died after the civilian plane hit the home, WDAM-TV quoted Hattiesburg Assistant Fire Chief Danny Wade as saying. Authorities did not immediately identify the victims or say whether they were on the plane or in the home. It was not immediately clear what caused the crash.The Federal Aviation Administration was called to investigate, police said.Hattiesburg is about 90 miles southeast of Jackson.

The United States is ranked number one in the world for pandemic preparedness, according to the Global Health Security Index. Still, hospitals and medical professionals are in dire need of personal protective gear, ventilators and beds as a looming surge in patients draws near.

Some hospitals are as ready as possible, but it’s unclear if even the best can handle what’s to come.

In the nation’s third largest city, Rush University Medical Center is one hospital tower built to handle disaster.

“That includes infectious disease pandemics, like we're experiencing now. So, not just did we build the tower, but we also routinely drill on these different scenarios,” says Paul Casey, Rush’s chief medical officer.

Constructed after 9/11, Rush’s CEO, Dr. Omar Lateef, says the facility was designed to handle mass casualty incidents, and now, it could be a model for epidemic response.

“Many of the same features of the building make it a building structured to treat highly contagious infections,” says Lateef.

The hospital has the ability to quickly ramp up to 130 percent capacity. Intake and extra beds can be added within minutes and are already on deck.

“We are essentially extending our emergency department into our ground floor pavilion area,” says capital projects construction manager Angela Tosic.

The ambulance bay area has been transformed into a triage area. They are converting spaces into what are known as “negative pressure” units that help to prevent cross-contamination.

“We can take entire quadrants of the building flip switches and make them negative pressure,” explains Lateef. “We can take massive areas of the building that when we built them are nice hallways but secretly inside the columns are oxygen dispensers.”

The incident command center is at the heart of the operation.

“We closely monitor both the activity of coronavirus locally, as well as our testing of coronavirus,” says Casey. “And then, we look at what's the next step that we need to be prepared to take.”

Keeping staff safe and preventing the spread of the virus is a top priority. Employees are being asked to self-monitor and check their temperature at home twice a day.

Once at work, facial recognition scanners not only confirm their identities but also take real-time temperature readings to ensure they do not have fevers.

Should staffer’s exhibit symptoms, a drive through COVID-19 testing area is already up and running.

Patients exhibiting COVID-19-like symptoms enter and are housed in a completely separate unit.

Rush says it will max out its bed capacity as much as possible but has to balance that with not running out of available staff.

“The number we have is when patients stop coming in we'll figure out a way to not turn people away,” says Lateef.