A Place for Pets in Disaster Planning

During January’s torrential rains, a group of South Pasadena horse owners and volunteers huddled together in Chemin Shapiro’s living room late one night and pondered an evacuation plan.

The walls shook as the group peered through a window and watched a hillside collapse onto two houses across the nearby Arroyo Seco.

“If you could’ve heard that hillside coming down ... it was beyond scary,” said Shapiro, who boards 35 horses in a barn behind her house. “The horses were going nuts.”

On the advice of a city Planning and Building Department engineer, the horse owners moved their animals, along with Shapiro’s potbellied pig, across the street to a city-owned baseball diamond. But when police said they could not be kept in the public park, Shapiro moved them back onto her property to wait out the storm.

That apparent lack of coordination, in addition to similar troubles witnessed during Hurricane Katrina, has prompted South Pasadena’s Animal Commission to push for a citywide animal evacuation plan. Other cities are expected to do likewise.

Assemblyman Leland Yee (D-San Francisco) said he planned to introduce legislation next month that would require all municipalities to take into account the “needs of individuals with household pets, service animals and livestock” in their disaster planning.

Of New Orleans, he said, “I saw horrible pictures of animals floating out there, of human beings torn between staying with their pets and risking their safety or separating from them,” said Yee, who does not own a pet. “That was pretty gut-wrenching for me.”

A group of wealthy donors even chartered commercial jets to pick up hundreds of dogs and cats left stranded by Hurricane Katrina. One Texas oil billionaire and his wife paid roughly $90,000 to fly more than 200 dogs and cats to shelters in California.

Yee said his bill has garnered so much support that it has bypassed the standard committee hearing phase and will be heard on the Assembly floor in early January. His office estimates that fewer than half the counties in the state have incorporated animal rescue into their disaster plans.

In South Pasadena, police and fire officials are working with the Animal Commission to develop a plan. The panel hopes to eventually establish a team of volunteer rescuers who would be responsible for leading all animals, from horses to house pets, to safer ground.

At a recent commission meeting, Chairwoman Marysia Wojcik handed out signs for pet owners to hang on their front doors during an evacuation. The signs would indicate how many dogs, cats, horses and birds are in the house and ready for evacuation.

Wojcik said the commission was considering a survey to determine how many pets are housed by city residents and to designate places that could serve as animal triage facilities.

Currently, the city contracts with the Pasadena Humane Society to handle its animal services for about $100,000 a year. But the agency can easily be overwhelmed by a major disaster, officials said.

“Before the hurricane, cities would talk about disaster planning and say, ‘Oh, well, the humane society will take care of the animals,’ ” said Steve McNall, president of the Pasadena Humane Society, which contracts its services to seven cities in the county. “But now they know that there’s only so much we can do.”

McNall said his agency had the capacity to evacuate and shelter up to 500 animals. If the shelter reaches capacity, he said, the society can call on its volunteers to provide alternative spaces.

For some animal services agencies, evacuations are nothing new.

“We don’t even have time for drills. We get the real thing, it seems like, every year,” said Kathy Jenks, director of the Ventura County Department of Animal Regulation.

A September wildfire that devoured more than 16,000 acres in the canyons along the Ventura and Los Angeles county lines forced the evacuation in both counties of hundreds of horses, along with other large animals such as llamas and mules. Jenks said many of the rescued creatures were sent to the Ventura County Fairgrounds at the opposite end of the county.

But during the same fire, city of Los Angeles and Los Angeles County workers evacuated more than 200 large animals to Pierce College in nearby Woodland Hills. The campus has served for years as an official animal evacuation area.

Pet owners are responsible for feeding and providing medical aid for their animals while at the college. But the city, the county and volunteers have shipped in feed in the past, said Regina Casey, an agriculture assistant at the college.

The September evacuations went smoothly, but a jurisdictional problem led to some confusion.

In Ventura County, “People started coming and yanking horses over to Pierce College,” Jenks said. “Pierce College didn’t really want the animals there. It was just a ... mess.”

Dwayne Clark, a spokesman for Los Angeles Animal Services, said his workers did in fact evacuate horses from a Bell Canyon neighborhood in Ventura County, just west of the Los Angeles County line and closer to Pierce College than to the fairgrounds in Ventura.

“But in a situation like that, it doesn’t matter where the horses are at. If they need us to evacuate them, we’re going to be there,” he said.

Regardless of how prepared a county is for animal evacuations, there’s only so much it can do at the neighborhood level, said Marta Granstedt, a horse doctor in Simi Valley. Granstedt is working on an evacuation plan for horses and house pets in the city’s Bridle Path neighborhood.

“To me, an evacuation plan is knowing exactly where the animals are and having contact with each house to make sure they get out of there,” said Granstedt, who evacuated her horse during the September fire. “The county has people ready to evacuate horses. But what are they going to do when people are at work, and they can’t get in?”

Granstedt said she hoped to draw up a list of local pet owners who would allow animal rescuers to enter their homes during an emergency.

South Pasadena may be a long way from coming up with a similar list, but public safety officials say they welcome the Animal Commission’s proposal with open arms.

Indeed, Police Chief Dan Watson said animal evacuation is one aspect of disaster planning that’s easily overlooked.

“Sure, Lassie can rescue humans,” Watson said, “but who will rescue Lassie?”