June 17, 2025, is a day Mick Phillips won’t soon forget.
The 51-year-old resident of Crooked River Ranch owns A2Z Security and was working for a client in Bend when he got an evacuation notification on his phone due to the Alder Springs fire that broke out on Crooked River National Grasslands.
“It went from a level one to a level two really quick, so I got back home as fast as I could,” said Phillips, who owns a two-acre hobby farm with his wife, Angie. “By the time I got back (to the farm) and had the animals loaded up, we’d already hit a level three. This was within an hour.”
The couple, who lived in Bend from 1993 to 2015 before moving to Arizona for five years, had been back in Bend since 2020. It was their first time undergoing a mandatory evacuation, and the stress of the situation was compounded by having to get their eight animals, including alpacas, goats, dogs, and cats. A saving grace, Phillips said, was the assistance of the Pet Evacuation Team.
“I can’t say enough good things about the Pet Evacuation Team. What they did for us was amazing,” Phillips said. “We loaded up, and we got out of there as fast as we could. But we didn’t have any water or hay. We didn’t have anything. When we got there, they had a whole procedure. They knew exactly what they were doing. They checked us in, they tagged the animals and tagged us, so they could keep the right animals with the right people. We got them all settled in, and everything was good. They handled everything. They would feed them and water them. They took care of it all. They were phenomenal in everything they did.”
PET is an all-volunteer nonprofit organization that works with the emergency-management units for Deschutes and Jefferson counties and the Red Cross to ensure safe haven for any animals forced out of their homes by a natural disaster. They also respond to animal-welfare situations when needed.
Phillips said he and his wife received the evacuation alert and then got a follow-up notification to take their animals to the Deschutes County Fairgrounds in Redmond, where volunteers from PET met them and quickly assuaged their fears.
“Everything happened so fast,” he recalls. “We got there, and there were a fair amount of animals in there. There were a lot of horses, a bunch of goats. We had the only alpacas there. There were chickens and sheep. There’s all kinds of animals that were out there.
“Our alpacas are not your typical alpacas that you can go up and pet,” he added. “They’re rescues, so they’re never happy to be wrangled up and put somewhere else. But when they were with the Pet Evacuation Team, they handled them really well. There were no issues. They were very particular about asking questions and looking at the animals to say, ‘This one looks sick. This one’s going over there.’ They were careful to make sure that, to the best of their abilities, they were preventing any type of disease spread or anything like that. They mucked the stalls, and made sure food was separated for the animals.”
The Phillips have an unaltered female goat, and volunteers from PET ensured she wasn’t inadvertently placed with other animals, to avoid any surprise pregnancies. And they called the couple, who had set up their travel trailer out in the fairgrounds’ front parking lot, when one of their alpacas started acting strange.
“We were not required to stay. They had our information, and if there was an emergency or any questions, they contacted us,” he said. “We did get a call from them because our male alpaca does this really weird gurgling sound whenever he wants to mate. He was doing that, and they didn’t know if there was something wrong with him.”
Carolyn Gaubatz, 60, is the program director for PET, which formed in 2001 and then received its nonprofit status in 2010. She said ensuring the animals are well cared for, and owners are put at ease, is the organization’s priority.
“What we do, and what we’ve always done, since our inception, is to partner with the emergency management services area of Deschutes County and Jefferson County, and the Red Cross,” Gaubatz said. During level three evacuations, Gaubatz is contacted by one of those agencies, and PET deploys, typically to the Deschutes County Fairgrounds in Redmond or the Jefferson County Fairgrounds in Madras. They then take in farm animals and pets whose owners are being forced to evacuate their homes.
“We’re a mobile team, which means that we bring all of our equipment with us,” she said. “We’re able to care for all sorts of animals. Basically any type of animal that you have, if we have a place we can evacuate them to, we care for them.”
She said the evacuations typically last no more than a week, during which PET volunteers work in shifts around the clock to provide full care and monitoring of animals “so that their owners, who are displaced, don’t have to worry about what’s going to happen to them and how they’re going to be able to figure out how to care for them while they’re displaced from their home.”
The organization has about 75 regular volunteers.
“We’re always searching for new volunteers and looking for people who have a really good comfort level with farm animals in particular, or ‘barn life’ as I call it,” said Gaubatz, who also volunteers with the U.S. Forest Service. She said that while they have two trailers fully stock with the necessary equipment to care for animals, they “don’t always have straw bedding materials for the stalls, or dog and cat food, or feed for the animals,” so they rely on contributions from individuals, other organizations, and businesses to help provide those items.
“We get on-the-spot donations from people. Last year, during the Alder Springs Fire, we received tons of hay, and we had one company that brought us a dump truck full of bedding materials for the stalls,” she said. “We received thousands of pounds of animal food, and then, at the end of our season, if we haven’t gone through all of our donated food and straw and hay, we pay it forward to other nonprofits in the area that are in animal welfare.”
“We’re all in alignment out here in Central Oregon,” she said. “If you’re a nonprofit, and you’re in the animal-welfare business, we always try to partner with each other. We all try to help each other out.”
One area in which PET could use aid, Phillips said, is in monetary donations and fundraising.
“They’re unfunded, and they need help. I would like to see the community support them better,” he said.
One way in which the community can help is by signing up to fill special bags with cans and bottles that’ll then benefit PET through the Bottle Drop Oregon Redemption Center’s program for nonprofits. The group raised approximately $6,000 from the bottle-drop returns last year.
“Bottle drop has those amazing blue bags that are for nonprofits, and we try to get as many people as we can find to use those blue bags, because all of the proceeds for those deposit-worthy bottles goes directly to the nonprofit,” Gaubatz said. “Every bag has a sticker with our contact information on it, and we make sure people know that when they have one of our bags, if they email our bottle-drop coordinator, he will come to your home and pick up those cans and bottles, and turn around and give you empty bags to keep you going.”
Most of the organization’s money goes toward maintenance and gas for the PET truck and then ensuring the group’s two trailers are stocked with all the equipment needed to hit the road quickly when they’re deployed.
“We’re a very, very lean program” Gaubatz said. “The bottle-drop proceeds pretty much go to keeping our truck going and the other various purchases that we need to make during the year. We have things that we’d like to do going forward, but we’re very mindful of the costs of things.”
She said one priority is digitizing the intake process and animal-custody handoff that occurs when an owner brings their animal to PET during an evacuation. Currently, volunteers do much of the intake process manually.
“It’s very difficult when you’re trying to check in 20 animals at a time. It’s really hard to make sure that your paperwork stays organized, so we’re slowly trying to computerize and go digital,” she said. “In my former life, I was a software consultant for almost 20 years, so for me, going digital will, I think, make us much more efficient in the way that we track the animals that we have in our care and making sure we have all of the proper documentation. It’s really hard to ensure that your paperwork doesn’t blow out barn doors or get moved somewhere, so we’re always extremely careful. But really, we need to move away from paper. We can’t go completely paperless, but we can get really close.”
The organization invested in three laptops last year to help with those processes but still has more to do, Gaubatz said.
“We have other software that we need to start using and some other apps that would make us more efficient,” she said. “ But, you know, we just need to see whether or not we can afford to spend that money because it’s going to be an early fire season, and it’s going to be a long fire season. We just want to make sure that we don’t spend money that we’ll need later on.”
Gaubatz always carries the PET phone with her, on which she’s notified by emergency services when a level three evacuation occurs. She then contacts volunteers, who spring into action. Last year, when the evacuation notices went out during the Flat Fire, she was at the top of Lava Butte in Bend, volunteering for the forest service. She quickly messaged her team via Slack.
“We had probably 20 people on the ground in Madras within four hours, which is pretty phenomenal,” she said, adding that volunteers typically work four-hour shifts although “some of us work pretty much 24 hours for the first couple of days of an evacuation.”
PET volunteers take part in annual training to ensure they all use proper animal-handling techniques and understand processes they should be using, so they’re ready for what can be a demanding situation when owners arrive with their animals at an evacuation site.
“There’s usually a bunch of different animals, of all shapes and sizes, that we’re trying to get checked in at the same time, so it can be very stressful for our volunteers,” Gaubatz said. “We train with our group at least once a year, if not more, to go over animal-handling techniques. We have a lot of longtime volunteers, so they’re very comfortable and they’ve done this before. They know what’s expected, and everyone pitches in.
“Last year, we got a big group of new volunteers and literally, within days of our training, they were activated, and we were deployed. They were able to take a lot of what they learned during the trainings and apply it,” she added. “We have very strict standards for how we handle animals, and we stick to those standards to ensure the safety and the welfare of the animals.”
In addition to working during evacuations, PET volunteers also attend community events and wildfire fairs to help educate people about their services and how quickly a level-one “Be ready to evacuate” notification can escalate to a “Be set to evacuate” level-2 alert and then to a full-blown “Go now” level-three evacuation. Gaubatz said that escalation from level one to three can take as little as 30 minutes, so preparation is critical.
“Any opportunity we have to spread information and educate people, we really try to make an effort to do that,” she said. “Most people aren’t understanding about fire and being prepared for fire. But we should always think of ourselves in the Central Oregon area as being at a level one because moving from a level-one evacuation notification to a level three (is fast). You’ve got to get yourself completely ready to go and out the door safely. And if you’re not already prepared, it’s a stressful event for the homeowner and the animal owner. The animals are stressed, the owners are stressed. It’s a really scary thing. Am I leaving my house to never come back to it? What do I need to have? Do I have everything I need?”
Also at issue is the act of evacuating farm animals, which can be difficult during even normal times. During the Flat Fire, she said many individuals with trailers stepped up to help animal owners who had no way to evacuate their animals.
“We really want to encourage people that if you have animals that you can’t take with you, instead of just letting them free, if you have a way to get them to a location where we are deployed, we will care for your animals,” she said.
“It’s a very stressful thing,” she added. “When you get people coming in to drop their animals off, they have no idea what they’re stepping into. They don’t know us. Most likely, they’ve never had to evacuate before, and we’re asking these folks to hand over their pride and joy. Last year during the Alder Springs fire, we had three stallions that were upwards of $50,000 or more. And we’re asking their owners to hand them over to strangers. The animals could be their livelihood, or they’re companion animals, like family. That’s how I consider my animals. So, we’re asking a lot, and it’s stressful.”
To volunteer with PET: https://www.petevacuationteam.com/new-page To participate in the Bottle Drop program:contact mylum.o@petevacuationteam.com.
This article appears in Central Oregon Pets Spring 2026.
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