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Flooded City Rallies To Rescue Its Pets

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The New York Times

The Tampa Tribune

Published: June 30, 2008

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa - CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa - As floodwaters began to rise this spring, forcing thousands from their homes, Sgt. Kent Choate oversaw one of the larger evacuation efforts, providing shelter to hundreds of animals whose owners had been displaced.

"We expected we'd house our animals and maybe 100 more lost animals, but then one of the city's pumps broke, and we knew it was going to grow exponentially," said Choate, a police sergeant who heads the animal control unit of Cedar Rapids. "We just didn't know how big."

Almost every spring, water from the nearby Cedar River flooded the approach to the building that housed the animal shelter. But this spring was different. Heavy rain left surrounding farmland saturated, and by early June the engorged Cedar River, normally a lazy stretch of water that feeds the Mississippi, washed over its banks, flooding an estimated 4,200 homes here and displacing thousands.

As the shelter flooded, animal control officers were forced to relocate the animal shelter to higher ground at nearby Kirkwood Community College, where Anne Duffy, a professor of veterinary technology, previously had offered the school's Animal Health Technology building as a temporary shelter during flooding.

"We both agreed after the May flooding that we should put a policy together," Duffy said. "We were going to get right on that, but then the flood came up before the policy did."

As the situation deteriorated, flood victims, many staying in hotels, shelters or even cars, began dropping off their pets at the college. Others, who had been forced to flee without their pets, began calling in pleading for their animals to be rescued. Within days, what had started as a makeshift shelter had grown into a sprawling operation housing nearly 1,000 displaced animals - dogs, cats, rabbits, birds, lizards, a red-eared slider turtle - in three buildings.

With the influx of animals came an infusion of aid. Several national chain stores donated supplies. Veterinary technicians came from as far away as California to volunteer, and legions of veterinarians, groomers and even flood victims soon arrived at the shelter wanting to help.

One of the lessons driven home after Hurricane Katrina - in which an estimated 200,000 animals were displaced - was that some residents risked, and lost, their lives rather than leave a beloved pet behind.

"The biggest thing learned by everyone from Katrina is the importance of animals in people's lives," said Diane Webber, disaster preparedness director for the Humane Society of the United States. "They can't be excluded from disaster planning and response. People aren't going to function and they're not going to evacuate if their animals aren't provided for."

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