As Hurricane season is full steam ahead, have you stopped and thought "Am I prepared?" Being prepared ranges from gathering extra batteries and filling your bathtub with water to locating rabies records for your pets and making sure you have a plan for them as well. Think about it: A Hurricane is barreling towards eastern NC (never heard that phrase before, have you?) and you have goats and cattle. What are you going to do? What about your cats and dogs? To better prepare yourself and your pets / livestock, please visit the websites below that tell you how to do just that. Remember: PLAN AHEAD and STAY CALM :) Hurricanes let us know when they are coming, so you have plenty of time to get ready.
Craven County and Jones County have a plan. It is called the CARTs (County Animal Response Team) plan and it involves Cooperative Extension, local government and local Emergency Management, Department of Social Services, local Health Department, Animal Control, local animal shelters, NC Department of Agriculture veterinarians, American Red Cross and local volunteers. Read on to see exactly what the CARTs team does.
At the end of August 2011, Hurricane Irene descended upon
eastern North Carolina. We knew she was going to hit hard at the coast. We
decided to push forward with our Jones CART plan and open the animal shelter as a
part of the human shelter – a co-location shelter. We had several people bring
their dogs with them before the storm. We registered them and housed the
animals in a separate part of the building in their crates with food and water.
Just as we thought the storm was passing over, we started to hear a terrible
sound within the building. We looked outside and noticed hundreds of small
pieces of insulation blowing all around in front of the building. It was then
that we heard the roof blow off of the building where the animals were. As it
turns out, we were able to safely move all of the animals to another building,
as well as we had to relocate our human shelter. As you can imagine, the people
and animals that attended this shelter came from homes that would not have fared even as well as the Civic Center did (where the shelter was located). It
is important for your county to have a plan in place, and volunteers available,
as well as have a good working relationship with local government, especially
the Department of Social Services and the local Red Cross, who will be in
charge of opening a shelter once given the authority to do so.
For NC Cooperative Extension's disaster website, click here.
For EDEN's (Extension Disaster Education Network) disaster website, click here.
For the Animal Health Network website, click here.
For the NC Department of Agriculture's animal sheltering website, click here.
