September 29, 2005
A staff member and former student from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Public Health have spent the past two weeks leading Mississippi’s volunteer animal rescue and recovery efforts in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.Bill Gentry, director of the Certificate Program in Community Preparedness and Disaster Management within the UNC School of Public Health’s department of health policy and administration, has been operating out of Hattiesburg with a 12-person team to coordinate efforts with Mississippi’s Board of Animal Health. Jimmy Tickel, a graduate of the certificate program, is a member of the group, which also includes North Carolina agriculture department veterinarians.

The team, scheduled to return to North Carolina Friday (Sept. 30) or Saturday (Oct. 1), coordinated the delivery of all supplies, medicine and veterinary care for both the animal shelters and local clinics affected by the hurricane, among other roles. Other responsibilities included managing all of the donated goods that arrived nationwide.

So far, Gentry said, the team has received 200 large palettes of dog food, 100 palettes of cat food, two full tractor-trailers of hay and about 50 palettes of horse feed.

“People have been overwhelmingly generous,” said Gentry, a former state emergency management official and veteran of numerous hurricane relief efforts.

Gentry said one of the biggest challenges is the volume of the rescue effort. More than 1,200 animals have been rescued since the storm hit, including cats, dogs, horses, cattle, donkeys, rabbits, iguanas, chickens, geese and ducks and even a couple of alligators.

“As far as we know, it was determined the alligators weren’t pets,” Gentry said. “They were eventually brought back to the coast by the Mississippi Department of Wildlife and returned to the wild.”

Gentry said volunteers expect to have all of the animals returned to their owners or adopted by the first week of October, and he said the task has a lot of personal rewards.

“Just the other day we delivered two dogs to two different families,” Gentry said. “The first family had three little children and as we were driving up to the house the dog started wagging his tail, so we knew we were in the right place. The other family was an older couple and they just welled up when the dog jumped out of our vehicle and greeted them. It was great.”

Gentry said one of the reasons the volunteer rescue effort has gone so well is that each animal is tagged with a microchip and a picture of the animal was placed on Petfinders.com, where owners could easily identify them.

While Gentry’s team has been working non-stop for two weeks, he said the work of the volunteers who have been rescuing the animals since immediately following the storm has been inspiring.

“These people have done an amazing job under very difficult circumstances,” said Gentry, “so we’re glad that we could come in and relieve them of some of their workload. They’re just very resilient.”

One of the other primary roles of the North Carolina volunteer team has been to assist local veterinarians affected by the storm in re-opening their clinics, Gentry said.

In some cases, animal clinics and veterinary practices were destroyed or so badly damaged that they were unable to operate out of their facilities following the storm, Gentry said. The volunteer team is helping these veterinarians open their practices in alternative locations and when needed, providing clinics with supplies and support.

The Certificate Program in Community Preparedness and Disaster Management is a yearlong series of classes offered by the School of Public Health’s department of health policy and administration. The program includes classes in everything from law enforcement’s role in disaster management to crisis communications and forensic epidemiology. For more information, visit http://hpaa.sph.unc.edu/disaster/.

To help with this relief effort, donations may be made to the Humane Society of the United States. Donations are accepted online at http://www.hsus.org/ or by mail to HSUS, Dept. DRFHBM, 2100 L Street, NW, Washington, DC 20037. Checks should be made payable to “HSUS Disaster Relief Fund.” The Humane Society can be contacted by phone at (888) 259-5431.

 

UNC School of Public Health contact: Gene Pinder, (919) 966-9756 or gpinder@email.unc.edu.

UNC News Services contact: Deb Saine, (919) 962-8415 or deborah_saine@unc.edu.

For further information please contact Ramona DuBose, Director of Communications for the UNC School of Public Health, by telephone at 919-966-7467 or by e-mail at ramona_dubose@unc.edu.

 

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