CARIBOU, Maine — Darren Woods, director of Aroostook County Emergency Management, looks at preparedness as a whole for Aroostook County and realized there’s a need for pet sheltering in case an emergency should occur.
This past fall Woods applied for a Homeland Security grant that helps with sheltering, which is where a majority of their funding has come from. He received $750 to get the team started.
Woods has put together a small core animal response team that would cover Aroostook County and they’re looking for enough volunteers, at least a dozen per team, to create northern, central and southern tiers to lessen travel time during an incident.
“It takes people, so we need those volunteers. We’re really hurting for volunteers on that team, the thing is we don’t currently have the capacity to handle an animal shelter, we don’t have the trained staff, and we don’t have enough of what we need to do it,” Woods said.
The small core group of volunteers, made up of eight County residents dedicated to servicing all of Aroostook County, have completed some training, such as how to set up a pet shelter, incident command training, and community response to emergencies training. Woods wants his volunteers to be prepared in case a person should have to evacuate their home in times of flooding, or due to hazardous materials incidents, and the big one Woods always worries about: county-wide, long-term power outages, something that would last more than a day.
The animal response team is in need of cages, animal blankets, plastic bags, garbage cans, food, cat litter, and more. They are starting to put those items together, and Woods says they have shelter trailers, positioned in different places throughout The County, that are set up for sheltering people, and they’re now including cages and pet blankets in case they deploy a shelter trailer to a certain location it goes with both with people and pet items.
For more information search for the Aroostook County Emergency Animal Response Team on Facebook.
