I spent all day today, and expect to do so for the next few days, as part of the team of Cajun Clickers Computer Club (www.clickers.org) volunteers working for the Office of Animal Health Services of the Louisiana Department of Agriculture and Forestry. The Office is coordinating the State's communication efforts and logging calls and emails for the Louisiana SPCA, which is doing the actual rescues along with law-enforcement personnel.
After I met with the State's Assistant Vet, and worked in their offices for a couple hours to get the volunteer project going, I met the rest of the Cajun Clickers volunteers at the Clickers offices with our project.
The Clickers volunteers are inputting all the phone call data and emails into an Excel spreadsheet for use by the SPCA in its efforts and by the OAHS in its efforts to coordinate donations and foster care for animals.
We had about 17 volunteers for about 5 hours entering data into individual copies of the State's spreadsheet, which I then consolidated into a “today” spreadsheet file and then updated the masterfile to add all these entries.
It was a long day, with lots of typing, no slow time and lots of effort by all. At that, we had it much easier than the volunteers manning the phones in the OAHS offices, because we didn't have to talk to all the frantic people.
We also had a Cajun Clickers volunteer drive south to the Lamar-Dixon Convention center to take pictures of pets that had been evacuated to there. This is more of the effort to match up pets with their owners. The people evacuations in New Orleans were “people only” and pets had to be left behind.
This has also given me a marvelous sense of the giving nature of people across the country. From people volunteering to drive from California or Michigan to help evacuate animals; to people in many states offering to house dogs, cats, horses, cattle, etc; to people offering to send donations and suggestions on how to make the donation process easier (LOTS of people said “use Paypal!”); to veterinary medicine doctors and technicians volunteering to come help; to people sending canned pet food, leashes, bowls and such; and to the huge number of writers who asked “what can I do? what do you need?”