KERR COUNTY, Texas (KXXV) — With more than 100 people still missing as of Sunday. The search along the Guadalupe River is far from over.
Dr. Deb Zoran and her team from the Texas A&M Veterinary Emergency Team arrived in Kerr County on July 4, just hours after catastrophic flooding turned homes, summer camps and river communities into active search zones. The team’s mission: to care for the search and rescue dogs working alongside first responders in dangerous conditions.
“Our team has been a deployment team since 2009, and so we've deployed quite a few times, and we're a state resource,” Zoran said. “When the weather is bad in Texas or there's fires or hurricanes, we're watching.”
Zoran said her team was monitoring the weather early on the morning of July 4. By that afternoon, the team had been officially activated by the state and was en route to Kerr County.
Working dogs, Zoran said, are unlike most pets. They are chosen for their stamina, fearlessness, and determination.
“They are fearless. They're unafraid of what we see and go, ‘Oh my God, there's no dog going over the top of that,’ and they're like, ‘Oh yeah, it's fine,’” Zoran said. “They have to be athletes to do this work because they're going over tree debris. They're going up and down riverbanks. They're going for 15 miles a day along the river bottom.”
Zoran’s team is on the ground to treat injured paws, prevent heat stress, and provide rest and hydration cycles to keep the dogs performing in difficult terrain.
“There’s a lot of helicopters and drones and people walking, and people, they're everywhere, and you find people,” Zoran said. “But eventually in these kinds of river floods, it has to turn into that nose because a lot of these people who have been lost are lost in the debris. They're lost in the houses that went down the river. They're lost in the cars. It's horrible, but they're lost in things that you can't see.”
According to Zoran, there are likely more than 100 dogs working across the region. That includes state and federal teams, as well as local agencies and law enforcement groups. To better support the wide search area, Zoran’s team has deployed mobile medical trailers and established multiple locations to provide faster access to care.
“One of the things that our team, because it's grown over the years, has is the capacity to put a team way upstream, a team in the middle, and if necessary, a team way downstream,” she said. “So during the day they don't have to drive 30 miles to get to a vet. They can drive five.”
Zoran said every deployment is different, and there is no set timeline for how long they’ll remain in Kerr County.
“You go in with the mindset that you're going to support the mission until it's time to turn it over to the locals,” she said. “They started at the headwaters, and they're going to work their way all the way down. That’s going to take a long time. So our mindset is very much a marathon right now.”
At the end of June, the Texas A&M Veterinary Emergency Team received $5 million in state funding to support disaster relief efforts like this.
