TAMPA, Fla — The sounds of explosions in Ukraine is Matthew Herring says he started his day...in the U.S.
"Yeah, I was actually on the phone with him this morning when the attack started," he said.
At the time, he was talking to Bryan Stern, who's currently working to evacuate two dozen people.
"He was able to hear and feel and smell the bombs dropping around Kyiv they were very close," Herring said.
It's all part of the mission of Project Dynamo, a Tampa-based non-profit, co-founded by Stern, Herring, and a few others that seek to rescue stranded Americans around the world.
"We're not just going to fold our hands and sit back and be spectators to this, there's no scenario where we say if there's Americans anywhere in the world that we're not coming to help them, that's just not how we're built," Herring said.
Herring tells ABC Action News that the group has been on standby for possible evacuations in Ukraine for weeks. This first group will be traveling out of the country and taken to an airport, where they can fly back to the U.S.
But the Project Dynamo team will be going back to coordinate dozens more evacuation requests. And if you have one, here's the information you need to send their way.
"So they go to our website, projectdynamo.org, and register their friends or their family or their loved ones, whoever it is that needs help in the country, we need their contact information, we need their documents, passports, visas if they need it," Herring said.
That evacuation team has been slowly traveling by bus to get out of the country and we're hoping to hear an update from them, on the ground in Europe, sometime Friday.
