During January's torrential rains, a group of South Pasadena horse owners and volunteers huddled together in Chemin Shapiro's living room late one night and pondered an evacuation plan.
The walls shook as the group peered through a window and watched a hillside collapse onto two houses across the nearby Arroyo Seco.
"If you could've heard that hillside coming down ... it was beyond scary," said Shapiro, who boards 35 horses in a barn behind her house. "The horses were going nuts."
On the advice of a city Planning and Building Department engineer, the horse owners moved their animals, along with Shapiro's potbellied pig, across the street to a city-owned baseball diamond. But when police said they could not be kept in the public park, Shapiro moved them back onto her property to wait out the storm.
That apparent lack of coordination, in addition to similar troubles witnessed during Hurricane Katrina, has prompted South Pasadena's Animal Commission to push for a citywide animal evacuation plan. Other cities are expected to do likewise.
Assemblyman Leland Yee (D-San Francisco) said he planned to introduce legislation next month that would require all municipalities to take into account the "needs of individuals with household pets, service animals and livestock" in their disaster planning.
Of New Orleans, he said, "I saw horrible pictures of animals floating out there, of human beings torn between staying with their pets and risking their safety or separating from them," said Yee, who does not own a pet. "That was pretty gut-wrenching for me."
A group of wealthy donors even chartered commercial jets to pick up hundreds of dogs and cats left stranded by Hurricane Katrina. One Texas oil billionaire and his wife paid roughly $90,000 to fly more than 200 dogs and cats to shelters in California.
Yee said his bill has garnered so much support that it has bypassed the standard committee hearing phase and will be heard on the Assembly floor in early January. His office estimates that fewer than half the counties in the state have incorporated animal rescue into their disaster plans.
In South Pasadena, police and fire officials are working with the Animal Commission to develop a plan. The panel hopes to eventually establish a team of volunteer rescuers who would be responsible for leading all animals, from horses to house pets, to safer ground.
