I'm new and am interested in starting a buddy system for evacuating pets in the event of fire or earthquake or just about anything else that might come our way. Does anyone have any tips on how I might organize this? We have mostly cats, dogs, reptiles, etc. I live in a hillside community.

Hi Pat,

What a great question and project! One thing you can do is start by investigating existing community organizations you could partner with to work on this project. It's usually much more effective to build a coalition and build partnerships and use an existing community network than to start from scratch. Examples: faith-based community, schools, Boy Scouts/Girl Scouts, Commerce Association, senior center, community center, Community Emergency Response Team (CERT), volunteer fire department ... just a few to get you started!

Thanks Karen. I've printed out the suggestions you made. Funny thing is that all my friends want to know how I'm going to take care of my pets when I'm off doing E.A.R.S. stuff...so I really need a buddy system...rescuing mine so I can rescue others-LOL!

For more useful info check out:

Organizing neighborhoods for disaster preparedness

http://www.slcneighborhoodpreparedness.net/

Click on the "Neighborhoods Disaster Preparedness Guidelines" link for a very informative PDF

Here are some more resources:

The Los Angeles County government has Emergency Preparedness Focus Sheets (some available in Spanish too). They are in bite-sized, downloadable PDF format.

Topics from 2002 include:

Conducting a meeting -- with a sample script to use to get people to come to the meeting

Inventory resources -- who has what in the neighborhood

Form response teams -- who do people in the neighborhood call first

Many other focus sheets are available. The sheets from 2002 -- and anything before 2006 -- are available at: http://lacoa.org/esparc.htm

The sheets from 2006 are at: http://lacoa.org/esp.htm

Here is link to entire English PDF version of "Neighborhood Preparedness" module:
http://lacoa.org/PDF/ESP-Neighborhood-AWARE-Plan.pdf

For the Spanish version go here: http://lacoa.org/PDF/ESP-AWARE-Spanish2003.pdf

They are really quite useful.

Thank you, KD! Those are great resources. Thank you for pointing them out!