When Hurricane Frances finally completed its leisurely trek across the beleaguered Florida peninsula over Labor Day weekend, residents emerged from their shelters to find their lives eminently more soggy, but not necessarily more inhospitable. They, by and large, were grateful to have been spared the wrath of Frances, particularly since the massive storm came just weeks after Charley blew apart southwest Florida.

But a strange thing happened on the road to recovery in the Sunshine State: It has kept raining in the days after Frances, triggering more flooding. What's more, another hurricane, the bigger and badder Ivan, lingers in the Caribbean, causing anxiety among the public, not to mention logistical problems for shelters.

The rising floodwaters have already created two disaster situations for animals, both of which required difficult rescues. One involved more than 30 horses and 20 goats in Volusia County, and the other more than 70 cats in DeSoto County.

All the Pretty Soaked Horses

Volusia County has 152 square miles of water, and in the days after Frances, it seemed to have a lot more, said Laura Bevan, the incident commander for The HSUS's national Disaster Animal Rescue Teams in Florida. Many areas were under water, including an animal sanctuary in the rural part of the county where 36 horses and 25 goats were battling the rising floodwaters.

On Wednesday, September 8, Volusia County Animal Control and some area cattlemen—people who had gone through our DART training—performed the Herculean task of wading through a mile of nearly 3-feet-deep water to reach the trapped horses at the sanctuary. The harder part, as Bevan noted, was securing the horses, many of whom clearly had not been handled in years, and walking them back through a mile of water to the transport truck.

"This was such strenuous work that each person could handle maybe one horse, and that was it. They were wiped out," said Bevan, who noted that the horses were taken to a county site with 600 stalls. "The work was so strenuous in fact that they couldn't finish the job in one day. They could only get to 17 of them."

The problem here is that horses, unlike cattle, can't stand in water for long periods. They develop leg, hoof and skin problems. Time was of the essence, Bevan said.

To help, Bevan called in reinforcements from national DART. By Thursday, three members of the DART team, including two from Days End Farm Horse Rescue in Maryland, joined a host of local workers at the site to rescue the remaining 19 horses. They had learned their lesson from the previous day. No longer would they wade through a mile of waist-deep water. Instead, they drove a trailer truck through the water, loaded it with horses, and plowed back through the floodwaters with the animals securely in place.

They also rescued 25 goats in the area, Bevan noted.

"The concern in Volusia County now," Bevan added, "is that this is just the tip of the iceberg. There could be many more trapped animals that we just don't know about yet. And with Ivan heading toward us, it may only get worse."

House of Cats

On Thursday, the Southeast Regional Office received a phone call from a DeSoto County man desperate for help. He told the woman on the other end of the line—Bevan's mother, as it turned out—that his Arcadia home, and the 50 cats in it, was succumbing to floodwaters. Mom immediately called daughter, who immediately secured the nearby Bay Area DART team.

The DART team had to quickly grab 50 carriers and rush out to Arcadia. Then they had to be boated to the man's house. Once there, they discovered the man had not 50 kitties, but 71, along with three puppies and a handful of rabbits. The team managed to rescue them all.

The owner decided to surrender his animals; the DART team then made quick arrangements to send the menagerie to Pinellas County, where the shelters there had secured a former retail store to house the lost and surrendered animals after the storms.

"The hope is that we can evaluate these animals and then send them to areas where they stand a good chance for adoption," Bevan said.

No Room at the Inn

Animal shelter space is the main problem right now in Florida. Several shelters, including those in Sarasota and Volusia counties, need to relocate animals to make room for more owner surrenders or more lost pets. The animals keep arriving at shelters for a variety of reasons, Bevan said. Some owners are bringing in their pets for foster care because the power remains out in their homes; other animals are still being found at homes where the owners haven't returned. Then, as in Volusia and DeSoto counties, the floodwaters are creating another class of homeless animals.

"Normally, we would try to find shelters in the state where we could take these animals from the hard-hit areas, but virtually all of Florida is a hard-hit area. Every shelter is either full or needs the space for the approaching Ivan," Bevan said.

Some shelters are looking to work together, Bevan said, such as the Humane Society of Sarasota County and the Suncoast Humane Society in Charlotte County. In gearing up for Ivan's wallop, the shelters are looking to airlift about 70 animals from their two facilities to a humane society in Michigan. The deal isn't finalized yet, but regardless it shows the ingenuity of the shelter workers in Florida, Bevan said. Likewise, The HSUS is working with locate out-of-state shelters to relieve the animal crunch in Florida.

"Some of these shelters still have animals that were surrendered after Hurricane Charley," Bevan said. "They essentially promised these poor owners that they would do everything they could to adopt their animals. These people have already lost their homes and possessions and had to give up their pets, the least we can do is try to find their animals a new home. And that's exactly what we're trying to do."

With Hurricane Ivan churning through the Caribbean, the process of securing out-of-state shelters has had to take a backseat, once again, to disaster preparation. But once the storm passes, Bevan and the 13 other HSUS staffers or national DART team members in Florida will start searching for shelter space afresh—if they don't have to build temporary animal shelters for more Florida victims, that is.