How the Texas A&M Veterinary Emergency Team prepares for, and deploys to, disaster

Disasters—wildfires, hurricanes, tornadoes, and disease outbreaks—leave companion animals, livestock, and working canines in need of emergency medical care, often before local veterinarians can safely resume practice. The Texas A&M Veterinary Emergency Team (VET), formed in 2009, deploys to these events to provide triage, stabilization, and shelter support, as well as direct medical care to FEMA search and rescue canines.

Deb Zoran, DVM, PhD, DACVIM (SAIM), professor and director of the VET at Texas A&M University, shared with dvm360 how the team operates from activation to demobilization, what veterinary clinics often get wrong about disaster preparedness, and why understanding the incident command system is essential before, not during, a disaster.

dvm360 What is the Texas A&M Veterinary Emergency Team, and what kind of support does it give?

Deb Zoran, DVM, PhD, DACVIM (SAIM): The Texas A&M VET was formed to provide veterinary medical care to both resident animals (companion animals, exotic pets) and livestock (horses and all livestock species) impacted by disasters.The team can provide emergency triage and stabilization care to injured animals impacted by the disaster (fires, floods, tornadoes, or hurricanes) and shelter support care (illnesses, injuries or medical care) to animals housed in emergency animal shelters before, during or after a disaster.

The team also provides direct medical care and support to the FEMA search and rescue canines of Texas A&M Task Force (20 handlers/canines) when they deploy in Texas, and upon request to FEMA canines deployed to S&R support for a major disaster in other regions (examples include Hurricane’s Ian and Helene).

dvm360: What does a typical deployment look like, start to finish?

Zoran: There is really no such thing as a “typical” deployment – each one has its own challenges – from location to numbers or types of impacted animals, to support for us and the like – for example, Hurricane Isabelle was not at all like Hurricane Harvey or Helene….but that being said:a deployment starts with an official request [because] we never deploy on our own – without an official request we have no legal, medical, or jurisdictional protects (we are considered rogue) and are not eligible to be reimbursed for our work.The request can come from a city or county, the state (Texas or some other), or even an official entity (Texas Task Force 1 can request us) but the request is step one.

Then, once the state approves the request – we activate the team (we have a program that sends out messages to our team members that we are being requested to deploy) and start preparing. Our equipment is housed in warehouses outside of the campus – but it is all sitting ready to go (like firetrucks, only these are medical trailers/trucks) so that we don’t have to load them, just get the team together, develop the roster, the convoy plan (where we are going and how), and the timeline – we try to get the team out the door in 4 hrs (unless it is nighttime).

Once we arrive – we set up at the location that has been designated for us as our base (may be a fairgrounds, a high school parking lot or another area. Our work plan is determined by who we are working for (county/city/or state) and our job tasking (taking care of resident animals or working canines or both).We plan to be there until the work the completed or until the work can be taken over by the local community (power is back on so veterinarians can start to take care of animals again, etc) or the search and rescue is completed – this may be only a few days (3-7 day or may be 3-4 weeks).

Once the work is completed and we are released by the county/state – we again convoy back to our base, park our equipment, and everyone can go home to rest and rehab. If we take our students with us – their deployments are always much shorted (3-5 days maximum – to not overwhelm them and to allow others an opportunity to experience the deployment) but team members typically come for at least 1 week, and staff team members may be there for the duration – our longest deployment was close to 6 weeks.

dvm360: What is the hardest and most rewarding part of being on this team?

Zoran: Hardest is staying focused on the task and not getting pulled in to the emotion of the moment (very common for responders on their first or second deployment). It can be very intense work some times, fires for example may have a lot of severely burned animals that must be euthanized humanely, other times less so, but the days are still very long and the people you are working to help are often very distressed – so it is essential to stay focused on mission and your job.

Most rewarding is being there for people and animals on one of their worst days. Disasters often catch people completely off guard, they may take everything away from people – being able to give them hope by helping an animal and returning that animal to them is priceless.

dvm360: What should a veterinary clinic do to get ready for a disaster, and are there any areas clinics tend to fall short?

Zoran: Two important things. First, have a plan for the clinic /practice. For evacuation, if you are in a flood zone or fire prone area for example (its very location dependent) and have the plan written out so that all of the staff know their jobs.

Second, know the local community/county plan, if there is a plan. Where will animals be sheltered who will be in charge (likely not the veterinarian – and that is ok) and how does the disaster plan in your community work – know the emergency manager and the local disaster response team (most veterinarians don’t know any of this)

dvm360: What should a practice do to protect its records and medications?

Zoran: It’s all part of having an evacuation plan – if you have a “no-notice” disaster (tornado or explosion or the like) where there is no time to evacuate, the best thing is to be insured, have good records of what you have in the practice and have good documentation of this. Records should be backed up – paper records are fine as long as you have a digital copy somewhere, but if your practice is all digital, having more than one back up and storage of that data not just in the cloud is also important.

dvm360: What's the one thing you wish every veterinarian knew about disaster preparedness?

Zoran The emergency management system, also called the incident command system or ICS. You can’t help in a disaster if you don’t understand the system at work and where you fit in the system.This is common complaint I hear from veterinarians – I wanted to help but didn’t know how – this is why. You have to know about the system and how it works BEFORE the disaster.

I tell veterinarians all the time, trying to ask an emergency manager or someone in the middle of disaster response what to do in the middle of a disaster is like trying to explain to a new tech how to turn on the oxygen tank or flow meter in the middle of a code….that is not the time.

dvm360: Your team deployed to the Hill Country on June 13 to help the Texas Animal Health Commission. How did that request come about?

Zoran: That response was to assist with Texas Animal Health Commission with their call log and inspections from specifically the Gillespie county area (Kerr, Gillespie, Kimble and Mason counties) after they had a positive case [of New World screwworm (NWS)].The request was typical (in Texas it is called a STAR -State of Texas Assistance Request) and our mission was to deploy to Gillespie county to help their inspectors with the 10x call volume they were receiving.This was before the state had opened up the inspector training portal so they didn’t have enough people to handle the volume of requests.After the first week, the people in the area started to understand what was needed, and the call volume dropped, so the need for us to stay in the region slowed to a trickle and we were released to go home.

dvm360: How is responding to a disease outbreak different from responding to a storm — in terms of equipment, training, and pace?

Zoran: Infectious disease responses are very, very different – the response is “top down” – the USDA and TAHC were responsible for all aspects of that response (or any fAD or infectious disease response – similar to COVID), so our mission was entirely directed from above.

In a disaster, our connection is to the local response so we are working closely with local shelters, vets, emergency managers to solve the problems created by the disaster.Everything is different – from equipment (you are not treating injured animal) to the training (we were looking for evidence NWS and doing paperwork so people could safely move their animals) to the pace – disasters are similar – sometimes you are crazy busy and sometimes you wait for the next group of animals to arrive – that is just part of response – you must learn to manage your expectations, time and energy.

dvm360: Your team is doing animal inspections, treatments, and sample collection. Can you walk me through what a day in the field looks like?

Zoran: Literally going to a farm or sale barn or property, having the farmer gather their sheep or cattle or horses or dogs, etc and bringing them to us for individual inspection (particularly looking for wounds, around body openings – eyes, nose, anus, umbilicus, etc), if any animals had wounds, careful exam for evidence of maggots (collection if present to be submitted ) and then treatment of all animals to be moved with an appropriate insecticide for the species in front of us.Over the week we were there we evaluated over 5000 animals.We collected quite a few maggots from wounds – but found no new positive cases (maggots were traditional versions).