Well... It's been an interesting last couple of days. On Monday, I flew down to Melbourne for a business trip at zero-dark thirty, and Spot and Cookie were returned to the Animal Welfare League at Ipswich for desexing and transfer to the rehoming centre at Coombabah. Also on Monday, Toowoomba got completely pwn3d by epic flash flooding.
By Tuesday, I was still in Melbourne and the flood was heading for Ipswich, where we live. Our street was on a list of streets published by the city council as being potentially affected by the flood. The Ipswich motorway was cut in several places but the trains were still running, so I was able to get a train to Ipswich and walk home. Arbie had been packing and preparing to evacuate most of the day, so we loaded up the car (including our cats) and left. Plan A was to head to her brother's place but the roads were impassable, so we went with Plan B and spent the night at the evacuation centre at the Ipswich show grounds.
We can't say enough good things about the planning, organisation, and execution at the evacuation centre. While other evacuation centres in Brisbane and apparently Logan were turning away pets, at the Ipswich show grounds the council's animal welfare people had evacuated the pound to the show grounds, and they were using the greyhound accommodation and other animal pavilions for housing displaced animals. Our cats spent the night in cages in the poultry pavilion while we attempted to get some sleep upstairs.
By 5pm on Wednesday the floods had peaked at a level lower than what was projected so we found a route back to home via Eastern Heights (to avoid the CBD, which was flooded, and other low-lying areas which may have been flooded) and found that our street was unaffected by the floods. We went back to the show grounds, notified the appropriate authorities, grabbed the cats and headed home.
Unfortunately, a lot of other people haven't been so lucky...
I heard that some of the places were turning away pets. That's just awful, I understand it's not a great situation to have animals about in such times but there's a lot about it that's not great. I don't know what I'd do if they wouldn't let pixel in, but I imagine it would involve starting a fight and then sleeping in my car.
ReplyDeleteOne of the reasons that we voluntarily evacuated (besides the neighbours telling us that the 1974 floods had our block of land under water) was that we were concerned that if a mandatory evacuation was declared we wouldn't be allowed to take the cats with us. When we arrived at the evacuation shelter they were literal bus-loads of people arriving from the areas which were becoming inundated - and I doubt they would have been happy with 4 cats in cages displacing 4 people from those buses.
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