How the North Bay wildfires changed the rulebook for animal rescues

Brian Whipple arrived at Sonoma County’s animal shelter the night of Oct. 8, 2017, to find the Santa Rosa facility without power and dozens of cats and dogs in frenzied distress.

Whipple, operations manager for Sonoma County Animal Services, had fled his home on the outskirts of Santa Rosa’s Coffey Park earlier that night as flames from the Tubbs fire marched into his neighborhood. But he had no time to dwell on the fate of his house and belongings.

Inside the darkened shelter, Whipple and a handful of other staff members assessed the situation, blind to the magnitude of the unfolding disaster.

“We weren’t getting any communication about what was actually happening,” Whipple recalled. “There was no power to the building, no lights, no computers, no nothing. We set up a command post on a picnic table in the parking lot and started working from there.”

Nobody knew it at the time, but the 2017 firestorms would rewrite disaster response manuals for Northern California’s public and private animal welfare organizations, including those in Sonoma County. The overhaul continues today with efforts to coordinate emergency response, purchase and update equipment, install cutting-edge animal locating technology and train a new army of volunteers to help with animal rescue operations.

“It’s learning as we go the hard way. We don’t know what’s around the corner,” said Pam Ingalls, a founding board member of Wine Country Animal Lovers, a nonprofit Napa Valley animal rescue organization that helps coordinate disaster response in Sonoma, Lake and Napa counties.

One thing has become abundantly clear from recent wildfires: advance planning is key. The night the Tubbs fire raced into Santa Rosa, there was no time to reflect on what needed to be done.

“It was so fast,” Whipple said of the fires. “I don’t think anybody was ready to do anything.”

While the skeleton crew set up an impromptu command post in the parking lot of the Century Court shelter, animal control officers fanned out to evacuation centers to drop off crates and other supplies for people who fled their homes with pets in tow.

Animals, some injured, began arriving at the shelter, many brought in by first responders. But without power, staff were limited in what they could do.

“They were getting inundated with lost reports,” said Wendy Welling, executive director of the Humane Society of Sonoma County. “They had no system besides paper to try and match everything up.”

The Humane Society assumed temporary control of the county’s lost and found program. Injured animals were also brought to the agency’s Highway 12 facility for veterinary treatment. More severe cases were transported to UC Davis.

Social media sites were beginning to flood with reports of lost or found animals. Welling described the information overload as “chaos,” and said the Humane Society reached out to a number of people on Facebook asking them to take the pages down. The goal was getting lost and found reports funneled into a central database monitored by the Humane Society.

The system turned out to be cumbersome, and because it was an internal database, frustrating for members of the public who wanted access to the information in real time, Welling said. Among the many ongoing initiatives resulting from the 2017 fires is implementation of an online program called Finding Rover, which uses facial recognition technology to match lost pets with their owners. Animal welfare organizations across Sonoma County are in the process of adopting the program.

Animal welfare officials also are exploring ways of better harnessing the passion and expertise of people in the community who want to help animals in times of crisis. That includes hundreds of volunteers being trained for the Sonoma Community Animal Response Team, or CART, a new program with the mission of assisting public agencies during times of disaster.

The program is modeled on one in Napa Valley that grew out of the 2015 Valley fire in Lake County. During that disaster, hundreds of people and animals evacuated to the Napa County Fairgrounds in Calistoga.

Hordes of well-intentioned volunteers also showed up at the fairgrounds to help. But with no prior training, and no plan for where to put them to work, volunteers were “kind of tripping” over one another, said Ingalls with Wine Country Animal Lovers. Through CART programs, volunteers are certified in disaster response. The program also incorporates advocacy and education.

“It’s a very coordinated effort now,” Ingalls said.

In Sonoma County, public and private animal welfare agencies are hammering out memorandums of understanding to more clearly define roles and responsibilities during disasters. Sonoma County Animal Services is the lead agency, with others pitching in based on staffing, resources and jurisdiction.

Welling said another goal of the new agreements is to reimburse the Humane Society for services it provides during disasters. The agency provided free veterinary care in the immediate aftermath of the 2017 fires and continues to operate a low-cost community clinic one day a week.

For now, the Humane Society is relying on donations and grants to cover the clinic’s annual operating cost of $160,000.

“We’re trying to make people understand it’s a big part of our mission to keep animals out of the shelter and to keep pets with the people they love,” Welling said.

Local animal welfare agencies are planning on positioning new caches across Sonoma County where crates and other supplies can be readily accessed during emergencies. Sonoma County Animal Services also received a $22,000 grant for a generator to power the Century Court shelter so that when the next disaster strikes the facility won’t be left in the dark.

Whipple said approximately 100 animals displaced by the fires were brought to the county shelter at the height of the firestorms. Most were reunited with their owners.

Whipple returned to his Santa Rosa home more than two weeks after he was forced to evacuate. The house had been spared by the flames.

But his advice to pet owners now is rooted in his own unsettling experience.

“The community has to prepare themselves. Government is not going to be there right away,” he said.