Overview
When disaster strikes, animals are vulnerable and must rely on people to ensure their safety.
County emergency managers: the Empire State Animal Response Team (ESART) can help you develop a County Animal Response Team (CART) in your county. With a CART, you can plan to provide rapid, professional assistance to animals at the local level during natural and man-made disasters and emergencies.
CARTs recruit and train volunteers who are activated during an emergency to provide the initial assessment and response for the affected animals within their jurisdictions. The CARTs and CART volunteers across New York State are crucial first responders at the local level during a disaster.
Help Your Community
The bond and sense of responsibility that pet owners have for their beloved pet is real, and separation from a pet during an emergency or disaster can be devastating for both people and animals.
Letting community members know that trained responders are available to assist in the evacuation, transportation, and sheltering of their companion animals during times of crisis can improve compliance with emergency directives, keeping everyone safer. It also gives people peace of mind - especially when the first responders helping them are their neighbors and community members.
Benefits
Having a CART is beneficial to not only to your community, but to your county's emergency management office and to your county at large.
Benefits for County Emergency Management
No matter that hazard, county emergency management offices are tasked with keeping their communities safe during times of crisis. Animals are part of the community, and need to be kept safe too.
It's extremely valuable to have a team of volunteers with training in animal response who can be deployed through the incident command system. These volunteers can reassure people in the community, provide a measure of comfort during a time of stress, and improve the speed and efficiency of the disaster response as a whole.
Benefits to the County
Counties that choose to form a CART and credential their volunteers in the incident command system gain a myriad of benefits in addition to improved disaster response capabilities for their citizens.
When deployed by the county emergency manager, credentialed CART volunteers are considered temporary state employees. This designation relieves the county of liability and worker’s compensation concerns. This benefit is written into Article 26B and does not require additional applications by the county.
Additionally, CARTs may choose to form consortiums with other counties or enter into a memorandum of understanding with a non-governmental organization to further improve their response capabilities. CARTs may also apply for grants and/or raise funds as necessary, depending on the rules of their county.
Emergency Managers: Start a CART
We encourage county emergency managers to start a CART in their county, if there is not one already. View the current listing of County Animal Response Teams here. If there is not a CART in your county, use the form below to let us know that you're ready to get started.
What's Next
As you start your CART, the first step is to get develop your structure and plan of action.
Continue to familiarize yourself with our entire list of resources so that you will know not only how to best organize your CART, but also which organizations you can think about partnering with, and how to point members of your community to helpful information.
Once you have a plan in place, recruit in your community using the CART Volunteer Form and develop your team with resources from the County Animal Response Team Training page.