A Third of the City Won't Leave Without the Dog

This interview takes place nine summers from now. Del Catchings does not exist yet. The infrastructure gap that would produce her does.

Six in the morning on the eleventh consecutive day above 105°F in Austin, and the fleet maintenance building off Levander Loop is already loud. Industrial fans push air that registers 89 degrees and climbing. In the loading bays, forty-odd dogs occupy stacked crates. A separate room holds cats, a few rabbits, and one bearded dragon in a terrarium that someone carried from home, an animal that falls outside every federal definition of a sheltered pet. The building smells like disinfectant and warm fur and, faintly, like the coffee that went tepid in Del Catchings's thermos sometime around dawn.

Catchings manages this operation. It has had three official names since the city formalized it in 2029. She calls it "the site." Her title is Veterinary Emergency Coordinator, a position that didn't exist when she started working animal emergencies as a volunteer vet tech during the 2027 heat event. She now oversees a rotating staff of twelve, coordinates with Austin's animal protection officers, and maintains a spreadsheet she updates every evening. The spreadsheet tracks the gap between dispatch requests and animal arrivals. By her own description, it tells her "how many families went back inside."

Austin's cooling centers do not allow pets. They never have. In 2024, the city's Animal Advisory Commission unanimously recommended changing the policy.¹ What followed was a partial workaround: animal protection officers dispatched with a modified van to hold pets outside while owners sheltered inside. A decade later, the workaround is still the primary system.

We spoke at her desk, which is a folding table near the intake bay, before her outdoor window closed for the day. She answered every question like someone who has given this explanation before and fully expects to give it again.

When a heat advisory goes out in Austin now, what does your day look like?

Del: I'm up at four-thirty. By five I'm here, checking crates, checking the cooling system, printing intake paperwork because the Wi-Fi dies when the generators are under load. Nine o'clock the calls start. By eleven I've shut outdoor intake because the pavement in that lot hits 145, 150 degrees. You physically cannot walk a dog across it. So from eleven to about six, everything runs from inside. Dispatch coordination, phone calls, trying to get APO trucks to households that called two, three hours ago. Evening intake until dark. Then I go home and feed my own dog, who I haven't seen since four-thirty in the morning.

That's a good day. A good day is when the generators hold and nobody brings me a cat in a cardboard box.

The Animal Advisory Commission recommended allowing pets in cooling centers back in 2024. That was over a decade ago. What happened?

Del: The recommendation passed unanimously. I was in the room. And then someone had to find the square footage, the ventilation, the staffing, the liability coverage, the cleaning protocol. None of that materialized at the scale you'd need. What materialized was the cooling truck. One animal protection officer driving a modified van to a cooling center, picking up someone's dog, holding it in the vehicle while the person goes inside. The van has AC. The van is also driving through Austin at 108 degrees with the compressor maxed out, and I've had animals arrive in worse shape than when they left.

The number I actually watch is the gap in my spreadsheet. Calls requesting pickup versus APO trucks dispatched versus animals received at this site. That gap represents families that called, waited, and went back inside before the truck got there. Back into the house. Sometimes the house has working AC. Sometimes the house has AC that reads 78 on the thermostat but hasn't cycled in two hours because the grid's under load and the unit is old. You know the Maricopa data? Seventy-two percent of indoor heat deaths where AC was present, the unit wasn't actually functioning.² I see the same thing with animals. The dog was in a crate. The crate had a fan nearby. The fan was blowing hot air.

So the recommendation passed. The truck is the system. I run the truck.

A lot of people hear "won't evacuate without their pet" and read that as sentimental. An emotional decision people should just override.

Del: Override with what, exactly? I've been doing this since 2027. I don't even need the survey numbers anymore, but they're there. Roughly a third of people won't leave without the animal.³ In a metro this size, that's your evacuation compliance with a hole in it. You've built a cooling-center system that a third of your population won't use.

I spent my first two years trying to convince people to leave the dog. Then I stopped, because the dog wasn't the variable I could change. The system was.

The PETS Act was supposed to address this after Katrina.

Del: The PETS Act requires emergency plans to account for pets. It authorizes FEMA to reimburse pet sheltering costs. It's a real law that produced real changes. More pet-friendly sheltering exists now than pre-Katrina, absolutely.⁴ But it activates on a federal disaster declaration. How many of Austin's heat emergencies have triggered a federal disaster declaration?

The Act exists. It just doesn't reach what I do.

What does heat actually do to a dog or a cat? What are you seeing when animals come in?

Del: A dog's normal body temp is around 101.5. At 105 you're in a genuine emergency.⁶ They can't sweat meaningfully. They pant, and when the air they're panting into is 108 and humid, panting stops working. Cats are scarier in some ways because they rarely pant at all, so by the time you see a cat breathing open-mouthed, you're already behind. Way behind. The protocol is cool first, transport second. Tepid water, promote evaporation. That requires water, shade, and time. I don't always have all three at once.

The brachycephalic breeds are the worst. Bulldogs, pugs, Frenchies. Shortened airways, already compromised at baseline. I had a family bring in a French bulldog last summer whose temperature was 108.4. We saved him. Barely. The family had waited ninety minutes for the APO truck, then gave up and walked six blocks carrying the dog. In July. In Austin.

I noticed the bearded dragon in your intake bay. FEMA doesn't classify that as a household pet.

Del: FEMA's list is dogs, cats, birds, rabbits, rodents, and turtles.⁷ That's the universe. I get the ball python call every single heat event. Backyard chickens. Bearded dragons. I have no framework for any of them. I take them anyway. What am I going to tell someone, your lizard isn't federally recognized, good luck?

Who's calling you? What does your typical caller look like?

Del: Not the household with a car and a credit card. That family drives to a pet-friendly hotel and this system never touches them. My calls come from people who can't get to a hotel, can't afford one, or can't navigate the 311 system fast enough. A lot of elderly folks. A lot of people whose English isn't strong enough to work the phone tree. Plenty of people who have never called the city for anything in their lives and are doing it now because the power flickered and the dog is panting on the kitchen floor.

If you could change one thing about the system, what would it be?

Del: I don't need a redesign. I need square footage with climate control and a water line, co-located with the human cooling centers so people don't have to choose between sheltering themselves and keeping the animal. I need it staffed by dedicated intake workers, not APOs pulled off their regular calls. Those officers are already fielding welfare checks on people passed out in apartments; I'm borrowing them from that. And I need it in the city's emergency budget, not dependent on a federal reimbursement process that requires a disaster declaration I'm never going to get.

Everyone keeps asking me about system design. I need a line item.

You mentioned feeding your own dog when you get home. What happens to her during all this?

Del: She stays home. In the AC. Which works, for now. I check the thermostat from my phone probably six times a day during events. I'm not different from my clients. I'm just on the other side of the dispatch queue.

Do you ever think about leaving Austin?

Del: Every July. Then September comes and I start planning for next summer. I don't know what that makes me. Probably a Texan.

Footnotes

1. Austin Monitor, "Animal Advisory Commission wants pets allowed in cooling centers," July 10, 2024. https://www.austinmonitor.com/stories/2024/07/animal-advisory-commission-wants-pets-allowed-in-cooling-centers/ ↩

2. Maricopa County Department of Public Health, "Heat-Associated Deaths in Maricopa County, AZ: Final Report for 2025," April 2026. ↩

3. Chapman University Survey of American Fears, "Fleeing Death: Disaster Evacuations in America," October 2018. https://blogs.chapman.edu/wilkinson/2018/10/16/fleeing-death-disaster-evacuations-in-america/ ↩

4. AVMA, "PETS Act FAQ." https://www.avma.org/pets-act-faq ↩

5. Mitchell Hamline Law Journal of Public Policy and Practice, "The PETS Act and Beyond." https://open.mitchellhamline.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1016&context=policypractice ↩

6. Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine, "Heatstroke: A Medical Emergency." https://www.vet.cornell.edu/departments-centers-and-institutes/riney-canine-health-center/canine-health-information/heatstroke-medical-emergency ↩

7. FEMA, "4.4 Service Animals and Household Pets." https://www.fema.gov/cbrn-tools/key-planning-factors-bio/kpf-4/4 ↩