I have often said that I am three easy steps to the apocalypse at any given point. Anticipating what could go wrong and course correcting to prevent problems is a big part of animal sheltering. When contemplating disasters, I always thought that my worst nightmare was my shelter catching fire. It’s a plausible fear; many of us are in old, rundown buildings using second-hand or outdated equipment and there are furry little lives present in those buildings around the clock, every single day of the year. That was our situation in the old shelter on Range Road before we moved into our new Brunswick facility, and it is still the situation at our Edgecomb shelter. Faulty wiring sparking or an ancient dryer catching fire has happened to shelters before and could do so again. After Hurricane Helene, I realized that hurricanes are right up there with fires for me on the scale of sheltering worries.

I have friends, acquaintances and former colleagues from animal welfare spread all across the country. Many of us move throughout the country for our next professional step, and social media makes it is easy to keep in touch with each other. One such person for me is a former volunteer from my shelter in D.C. who eventually picked sheltering as her career field and landed at the Asheville Humane Society in North Carolina.

Watching the situation in the south unfold in Hurricane Helene’s aftermath has been horrifying on many levels, but as Mr. Rogers told us, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” My friend made it to her shelter with her cat as the hurricane passed and has stayed there since. She’s an incredibly positive person and says they’ve gotten an amazing amount of help moving pets out of their shelter from the BISSELL Pet Foundation, which flew those pets to a nearby shelter with power and running water to make room in Asheville for the pets inevitably displaced by the hurricane. She counts herself lucky that she has an apartment to go back to because the building is still standing, even if there is no power or running water. However, she said, “So many things and communities are simply gone — not damaged, gone.”

One of our transport partners, Diamonds in the Ruff, pulls dogs from a Georgia shelter that covers Treutlen County. That shelter’s roof came off and their dog kennels were destroyed. Thankfully, they got all the pets out ahead of the storm, but where will new pets in need of their help go?

These are just two stories; there are so many just like them all over Florida, Georgia, Tennessee and the Carolinas. The helpers are there. Animal welfare as a whole learned a lot from Hurricane Katrina about organized disaster response, and the importance on focusing in the early stages on moving the animals out of shelters in affected areas to the nearest shelters safely able to take them. The larger animal welfare groups, like the BISSELL Pet Foundation, the ASPCA, Humane Society of the United States and Best Friends, will often arrange and fund those transports, and those groups who have disaster response teams deploy boots on the ground to help. As the nearest operational shelters fill up, the groups start arranging transports to shelters farther away. Because of our location, Maine animal shelters are often among the last asked to help, but we have responded to our partners with our capacity and we are waiting to hear what we can do.

We will stretch as an organization as much as we can because I hope to goodness that if we were in similarly dire circumstances, our fellow shelters would stretch to help us. You can help us support them by adopting the pets currently in our care. That will free up space so that we can accept more animals from areas in need. If you have a personal connection to any area hit hard by Helene, I’m certain their local animal shelter would welcome your financial assistance. The national groups responding also need support to do their work; it takes a lot of resources to fund flights, overground transports and to send manpower to afflicted areas. Even when the natural disaster strikes far from home, there are still ways that each and every one of us can be the “helpers.”

Jess Townsend is executive director of Midcoast Humane.