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.
“Out of Hurricane Katrina we found that people won’t leave their homes if they can’t bring their pets, and Red Cross shelters are not designed for animals, they’re designed strictly for people. However, if we provided a pet sheltering team and a location to shelter pets at the shelter site that would be ok, so we could co-locate with the Red Cross shelter and take care of people’s animals,” Woods said.
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. I have some team leaders that are working very hard at it. They’ve created a Facebook page, and they have monthly meetings at the Aroostook County Emergency Management building here in Caribou.
“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. We know it’s a problem, we’ve been trying to work on it over the last year, but it really takes people to get involved and without us getting volunteers to help with that team. We’re going to continue to struggle and we’ll continue to fail when called upon,” 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, so it goes with both people and pet items.
“We’re starting to get a handle on what we need, we just need people to help us pull it off,” Woods said.
Woods has been in contact with an animal response team in the Cumberland County area, and says they’re fairly successful. His team has been getting information on how they can train and learn from southern Maine.
For more information search for the Aroostook County Emergency Animal Response Team on Facebook.
