Could you evacuate your home 15 minutes from now, with everything you would need to live with your pets in a hotel for a few days, weeks, or months? What if you had an hour’s notice?
Coverage of the fires near Los Angeles has been triggering to many of my friends here in Northern California, where we have suffered three massive fires (the Camp fire in Paradise in 2018, the North Complex fire in 2020, and, just last summer, the Park fire, which burned for over two months) in recent years. Through working as a volunteer for the North Valley Animal Disaster Group (NVADG, locally pronounced “nav-dag”) through two of those fires, and evacuating my family from two smaller fires that burned close to my home, I consider myself an expert at what to do and what not to do in response to a local disaster.
Readiness Tips
When your receive the very first report of a disaster near you, go find your pets’ ID tags, collars, and harnesses and put them on. Immediately contain your most skittish pet and work your way to the calmest one. Many frightened pets have been lost in the first few chaotic minutes of a disaster. Don’t wait for the call to evacuate before doing this, because once you receive that text from emergency services or see that news report, believe me, your hands may start shaking and your brain may go blank. Before it’s that real, you will be functioning better—perhaps not optimally, but better.
When we had another local disaster (the near-collapse of the Oroville Dam in 2017), I had been volunteering for days with animals that had been evacuated from my local shelter as a precaution. When I received an emergency alert on my phone saying that everyone in my city should immediately evacuate, I was already safely out of harm’s way in a neighboring city with those evacuated animals, but my husband, one of my dogs, and my son’s dog were at home. My hands started shaking so badly and my heart started pounding so hard that took me at least a full minute to successfully press the single button to call my husband’s cell phone to tell him to grab the dogs and evacuate—and many more minutes to figure out how to reach him when he did not answer (I called my next-door neighbors, who were packing their car, and pleaded with them to run next door to tell my husband that I had been trying to reach him; he had been mowing the lawn!). I was dismayed at my reaction, as I consider myself to be calm in a crisis, but the warning was so dire that I lost functionality for a few minutes.
To repeat: When the disaster get real, know ahead of time that you won’t be thinking very well. The more that you have in place in advance of an immediate evacuation order, the better you will be able to respond.
These organizations have done a far better job than I could at listing all the things a person should do to be ready for an emergency with pets in the home. Please check them out!
Pro tip: Plan for a disaster today. Think long and hard about what you would need to evacuate with all of your pets, and put all of those supplies in one or two key places. If making a list would help you in an actual disaster, make a checklist and put it with your emergency “go bag”. Then, do an actual dry run. Set a timer and put collars on all your pets, crate the cats, and load all your pets and supplies in your vehicle. How much time did it take? Did you have everything you needed? Practice until this is smooth and flawless. .
Helping Others in a Disaster Zone
Wringing your hands and wanting to help? There are many things that those of us who are outside a disaster zone can do to help:
Fostering: A video regarding the Los Angeles fires reported that the Canine Rescue Club put out a call asking for people to take shelter dogs into foster care so they could make room for dogs displaced by the fire; they got enough foster volunteers within six minutes to house over 200 dogs who were currently in shelters. That’s wonderful—and so necessary, because many people who evacuate won’t be able to take their dogs with them and will need temporary (and free) housing for their dogs.
But part of me wondered why there were 200 dogs who could benefit from foster care in shelters prior to that call! Please, if you can and there is a responsible shelter nearby who will provide food and veterinary support, foster a shelter dog even when there is no emergency! Fostering can help the dog become acclimated to living in a home, so he’s more likely to succeed when he finds one.
Donations: Financial donations sent to the agencies that are themselves providing temporary shelter and/or veterinary care for disaster victims are the most effective thing that anyone can provide, hands down. With enough money, people whose boots are already on the ground can solve any sort of problem, but a mountain of donations sent by well-wishers can create time-consuming, volunteer-consuming, and storage-consuming problems.
One of WDJ’s veterinary contributors, Dr. Catherine Ashe, worked for weeks to provide veterinary care for victims of the flooding and landslides after Hurricane Helene last year. She also helped recruit and direct other veterinarians and vet techs to provide badly needed services for injured and displaced animals. On her personal Facebook page, Dr. Ashe repeatedly stated that the volunteer veterinary teams needed very specific items, but were instead receiving literal tons of stuff that were both not what was most needed but also a problem to organize, store, and distribute. Moral: Find organizations that are asking for help, and ask what would help most! Do not make assumptions and send whatever stuff you think they might need.
I’ve seen this plea stated elsewhere, for donations that are requested for humans displaced by fires: When donations are needed, please do not send old stuff you are not using and hope it does some good. Your outdated food or medicines and moldy, old clothes and sheets and threadbare towels are not needed or wanted! Brand-new, or freshly washed and barely used clothing, blankets, and towels are quite welcome.
When the Camp fire burned down the town of Paradise, people responded by sending a literal mountain of material for the benefit of the hundreds of dogs and cats that were being held in local emergency shelters. Unfortunately, more than half of that mountain was trash, in no way safe or useful. People dropped off giant dog beds (generous but inappropriate in this situation), and giant pillows and couch cushions for goodness sake, which are all utterly unwashable and useless once they have dog pee or poop all over them, which, in an emergency shelter situation, can happen in about five minutes but will necessarily happen overnight (most dogs in emergency shelters are held in crates and may be taken out of crates just twice a day for a few minutes by exhausted volunteers; they have no runs where they can eliminate separately. For weeks, I and my fellow volunteers filled several Dumpsters a day with wet, sodden bedding that we had no choice but to dispose of.
Also, don’t donate blankets or other textiles that have holes in them, straps, decorative dingleballs, or fabric binding—all of which pose entrapment or choking dangers to pets if used for bedding. Most useful are clean and smaller blankets. Volunteers can easily take home a load or two of fleece throw blankets to wash, but few of us had washers or dryers that could handle king- or queen-sized comforters; these all get tossed after getting soiled. Towels are the most valuable; we could always use more towels to use for bedding (especially in crates for smaller dogs and cats) and for bathing animals. Puppy potty pads in any size and form were also critically needed.
I’m always impressed by how quickly pet owners step up to help other pet owners in disasters; just make sure you are providing help that truly helps!
Here are a few links for those who wish to donate or foster:
https://give.pasadenahumane.org/give/654134/#!/donation/checkout
https://www.animalwellnessfoundation.org/
https://www.laanimalservices.com/about-fostering
https://www.redcross.org/local/california/los-angeles.html
This article is so helpful, not only in thinking about prepping for an emergency, but for understanding the best ways to help others. Thank you!