Canadian Disaster Animal Response Team
June 2007
by Deborah Silk
Now is the time for all good men and women to come to the aid of the Canadian Disaster Animal Response Team (CDART). The Team was formed in 2003 shortly after Firestorm 2003 and their emergency animal rescue response in Kelowna. This base group of volunteers has actually been around though since 1994 when they started volunteering together after the Garnet Fire in Penticton. Their mandate was to safely shelter and care for animals in disasters. Who knew there would be so many disasters in the years to follow?
Pixie and Jetta were two pot bellied pigs that needed evacuating from the Naramata area during the Garnet Fire of 1994.
Since 1994, the team has gone under several different names, mostly because there was always a lack of professional training in Canada. As the team developed, they responded and continue to respond under the umbrella of the registered charity, Critteraid, based in Summerland, BC. In 1998, they evacuated the animals at the Kee-Two Wildlife Refuge in Salmon Arm, during the Mount Ida fire. They also set up an Animal Intake facility at the Parkinson's Rec Centre in Kelowna to receive any animal evacuees that were with their owners who needed to register as far south as Kelowna. While some of the animal evacuees were domesticated animals from Kee-Two, others included orphaned raccoons, skunks, owls, hawks, fawn.
Since that time, CDART volunteers have responded to a variety of large and small responses from house and apartment fires to Firestorm 2003 and Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. CDART volunteers have taken a variety of emergency animal rescue training and have taken the proactive step of crosstraining many of their volunteers with Emergency Social Services (ESS). This was invaluable to the residents of Barriere and Kelowna during the 6-8 week response in Firestorm 2003 where CDART volunteers started the season being mobilized to Osoyoos. Teams were later deployed to 100 Mile House and Kamloops to respond to the Barriere fire, to Kelowna for the Okanagan Mountain Park Fire and at the same time deployed to Penticton and Okanagan Falls for the Vaseaux Lake Fire.
Orphaned raccoon kittens were fed porridge in addition to regular food during their evacuation of the Refuge.
CDART has been busy since Firestorm 2003 and has developed a fully Canadian training course that has been sponsored by the Emergency Social Services Association, the Provincial Emergency Program as well as many local ESS groups throughout the Province. Training has been given to teams on Vancouver Island, the lower Mainland, the Okanagan and as far north as Kitimat. It is now time to develop CDART in Kelowna. With that in mind we are asking for volunteers to come forward in order that training can be set for the Central Okanagan area. There really is a job for every kind of volunteer and many of those positions do not have direct access to animals. CDART needs clerical volunteers for registering animals as they come in and those clerks work closely with more skilled animal handlers. They also need security volunteers, transport volunteers, worker care volunteers, "handyman" volunteers, safety volunteers and administrative volunteers. In addition, we need the skilled animal handler volunteers to carry on the direct care of the animals coming in to care. It is an enormous task to organize such a great team but the rewards of the networking that comes from each of these special individuals is absolutely staggering. People from all sorts of different backgrounds and organizations come together for a common cause to look after animals that need looking after. It doesn't get any better than that!
Once they have established some numbers of people available to take the training, CDART will set a date for the initial training in Kelowna with the course entitled, "We're Family, Too". The cost is $75 per person that includes a CDART Volunteer Binder. The course is a full day course and will be conducted on a Saturday or Sunday.
Please check out the CDART website at www.cdart.org and email to
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or call Critteraid Farm at 250.494.5057. Please be patient as some of the CDART volunteers are already working with the Provincial Emergency Program on preparations to care for animals affected by possible flooding in the lower mainland. Even with all that going on, it is prudent to begin developing a central Okanagan team.
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