The Pet Evacuation After-Action Review: A Printable Record of What Actually Happened

This page is a printable record to fill in after a real evacuation with your animals. It has you write down what alert reached you, what you reached for and could not find, what each place that took you in asked for, and what worked. It has no score, no grade and no judgment of you or your household. Fill in what you can, leave the rest blank, and file it with your pet records.

If this is a hard week

Support is open before you read anything else, and it does not depend on how you answer any prompt below.

• SAMHSA Disaster Distress Helpline. For emotional distress related to a disaster. SAMHSA’s page (last updated 09/26/2025) says: “Call or text 1-800-985-5990.” Spanish: Llama o envía un mensaje de texto 1-800-985-5990 presiona “2.” Deaf and Hard of Hearing ASL callers can text or call the same number using their preferred Relay provider. SAMHSA describes the service as available 24/7 to all residents of the U.S. and its territories. There is no need to give identifying information; the counselor may ask some basic questions at the end of the call, which are optional.
• 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Call 988, text 988, or chat at 988lifeline.org. The Get Help page says: “Using the 988 Lifeline is free. When you call, text, or chat the 988 Lifeline, your conversation is confidential.” Deaf and Hard of Hearing readers can use 988 Videophone, and TTY users can use their preferred relay service or dial 711 then 988. For a Spanish-speaking counselor, dial 988 and press 2, or text AYUDA to 988.
• Veterans Crisis Line. Veterans, service members and their families can dial 988 then press 1, text 838255, or chat online. You do not have to be enrolled in VA benefits or health care to connect.

Talking to a licensed professional is a reasonable next step.

You came back. The bag is by the door with the zip still open, there is a receipt in your pocket from a place you had never heard of a week ago, and somewhere in the car is a leash that belongs to a dog who never wore it. Every household that has been through this comes home holding facts nobody else has: which channel the order reached you on, which container the cat would not go into, which piece of paper someone demanded at a counter late at night. This page is for writing those down while they are still recoverable.

It is not the maintenance sheet. The pet emergency kit rotation checklist asks what expired. This one asks what failed under load, which is a different question, and the only honest way to answer it is from a real deployment.

The finding this record is built around

Leslie Irvine and Casara Andre published “Pet Loss in an Urban Firestorm: Grief and Hope after Colorado’s Marshall Fire” in the journal Animals on 26 January 2023. The fire ran through Louisville, Superior and unincorporated Boulder County on 30 December 2021. The authors write that the research literature has tended to associate failing to evacuate pets with a weak human-animal bond, and that researchers may have over-attributed the bond’s role and failed to account for the context of the event. Their conclusion: “In the Marshall Fire, as in Hurricane Katrina and the Fukushima nuclear disaster, factors well beyond the control of pet owners prevented many from saving their animals.”

The claim is scoped. The authors describe three specific events and the dynamics of one, not every evacuation everywhere. They note the Marshall Fire’s rapid onset in a densely populated area, which made it an unprecedented event in Colorado. That is why the finding sits at the top of a review sheet: what a household controlled is a researched, event-specific question, and it is not the question this printable exists to relitigate about you.

The paper also says something a page like this has to carry honestly. Planning information is widely available, but even the most comprehensive plans would have been of little use in the Marshall Fire because so many residents were away from home. A record of what happened is worth keeping. It is not a guarantee about the next event.

What the study measured that a household can act on

The authors counted the notification system. Of the first mandatory evacuation orders, issued at 11:47 a.m. to landlines, cellphones and emails of residents who had opted in, 215 notifications were sent and only 54 contacts confirmed receipt as instructed. Many residents said they did not know they had to opt into the system to receive alerts on their cell phones. Across the whole event: “Of the 24,289 emergency notifications sent out by the Boulder County Sheriff’s office during the Marshall fires, only 4637, or 19%, were confirmed as received.”

Now the qualifier, which anyone quoting those numbers must carry. Confirmation was an action the recipient had to take: press 1 on a reverse 911 call, or click a link in a text or email. The authors write that countless people likely received the notifications but dismissed the instructions, so the exact number received is impossible to know. The figure is a confirmation rate, not a delivery rate. What survives is the part that matters for your sheet: opt-in status was a real variable, many people did not know it was one, and you can change it on a Tuesday afternoon. That is why “how did the order reach you, and had you opted in” is the first substantive block on the printable.

One more finding shapes the block about another person. On rescue apps, the authors write that they require people who can enter your home in an emergency, and that pets must trust those people enough to let them enter, handle them, leash them, put them in carriers and transport them. They describe a Superior neighbor who, while evacuating himself, kicked in a door and rescued a dog that was home in a crate, and conclude: “Thus, social connections may be the best way to save the life of a pet.” A key is not the whole arrangement. The animal has to let that person pick it up.

What this page borrows, and from whom

FEMA publishes the Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation Program (HSEEP) doctrine, dated January 2020, which defines the After-Action Report and Improvement Plan structure most American emergency-management organizations use. Three things in it are worth borrowing and one is worth flagging.

Borrowed: the reconstruction step, and its refusal to ask why. HSEEP defines event reconstruction as “consolidating information from multiple sources into a single, fact-based account of what happened”, identifying the who, what, when, where and how of each decision, action or communication. Then: “The reconstruction activity is not concerned with understanding the why of a specific action.” That sentence is the design brief for this printable. A household sheet that asks why produces a confession, and this one has no why column.

Borrowed: non-attribution. HSEEP tells evaluators to observe exercise activity in a non-attribution environment, so observations are not tied to the individual who made them. At a kitchen table, that means the record describes what the household did, not what a named person in it did.

Borrowed: strengths are an observation category, not a consolation prize. HSEEP’s Table 5.4 sorts observations into two types. The first is “Strengths”, described as “Actions that went exceptionally well given the circumstances”. The second is “Areas for Improvement”, outcomes that did not meet expectations or intent, with the factors that contributed to the inability to meet critical tasks. We kept the first category and put it first on the sheet. We did not keep the second one’s framing. Asking for the factors behind an inability to meet critical tasks is defensible about a county’s exercise and indefensible about a family whose road was closed. What replaced it is a set of blocks about objects, documents, systems and doors, which a household can actually change.

Flagged: who the doctrine is for. HSEEP says it is for use by stakeholders across the whole community, but its scope paragraph names its audience as “agencies, jurisdictions/organizations, and stakeholders” such as public health, transportation and education, and its encouragement to adapt is addressed to exercise practitioners. A household is none of those. Nothing here is FEMA publishing a review format for families.

Ready.gov’s Make a Plan page (last updated 07/02/2026) runs four steps and stops at Step 4, “Practice Your Plan”, with one line under it: practice your plan with your household. Ready.gov’s pets page (last updated 03/20/2026) covers making a plan, building a kit, preparing pets for travel, large animals and staying informed. Neither has a step for reviewing after a real event. A state or county emergency management office may publish a household review sheet under some other name; if yours does, use theirs. This one is an adaptation of an organizational practice, and it claims no federal pedigree.

The three rules this record runs on

One: it records, it does not decide. Every field asks for something observable: what arrived, what was asked for, what was in the bag, what would not fit. No field is answered with a judgment about a person.

Two: nothing on it is scored. No grade, percentage, pass mark or comparison to another household. We publish no target time. The pet fire evacuation drill checklist says the same about drill times and refuses to invent one.

Three: the outcome of the animals is not an item on this sheet. No outcome column, no field for a death, no prompt about what you should have done. If that is where you are, the support routes above are open unconditionally, and this printable can wait indefinitely or never happen.

The printable

Print it. Fill in what you can, leave what you cannot, and keep it with your pet records. If you keep a pet emergency binder, it belongs behind the records tab so the next reader inherits what this household learned. Write in pen. Fill in the strengths block first; that order is deliberate and comes from HSEEP’s own two-category table.

Block A. Strengths, filled in first

HSEEP’s description is “Actions that went exceptionally well given the circumstances”. Given the circumstances is the operative clause: things that worked in the conditions you were actually in, not by some absolute standard.

Prompt	Fill in
What was already done before this started that you did not have to do during it	____
Which container, vehicle, document or contact worked exactly as intended	____
Something that went better than you expected it to	____
A person, inside or outside the household, who did what they said they would	____
Something you improvised on the spot that is worth keeping	____

Block B. The event, in plain facts

Who, what, when, where, how. No why column, by design.

Field	Fill in
Hazard and event name, if it had one	____
Date the household left, and date it returned	____
Type of instruction in force when you left: voluntary, mandatory, or none issued	____
Where the household went: name and county	____
Number of nights away	____
Animals in the household, by species and name	____
Vehicles used, and how many drivers were available	____
Who was physically at home when it started, and who was not	____

That last row is a scheduling fact, not a judgment. The Marshall Fire research turns on it: in the authors’ sample, all eight pet owners discussed being unable to return home, either because they were away from the area or because of emergency closures. Where people were is a fact about an ordinary weekday. Record it as one.

Block C. How the instruction reached you

The studied block. Fill it in even if the answer is “it did not.”

Field	Fill in
First channel that actually reached you, and approximate time	____
Other channels that reached you later, and roughly when	____
Channels you expected to hear from and did not	____
Were you enrolled in your county’s opt-in alert system before this? Yes / No / Did not know one existed	____
Did the message name your zone, your street, or the whole jurisdiction	____
Who in the household got the message first, and how it reached everyone else	____
Phone service, power and internet status at the moment it arrived	____
Enrollment link or phone number for your county’s system, written here for next time	____

Ready.gov’s pets page tells readers to pay attention to wireless emergency alerts sent by state and local public safety officials. Those alerts are the layer that arrives without enrollment. The opt-in county system is a separate layer, and it is the one Marshall Fire residents did not know they had to join. The wildfire evacuation alert apps guide covers the stack of systems around it, if the honest answer in the fourth row is that you had never signed up for anything.

Block D. What you carried and never opened

The part of the bag that cost weight and bought nothing this time. It is inventory data about one hazard: the same item can be dead weight in a two-night hotel evacuation and the most important thing you own in a two-week displacement.

Item carried	Used?	If never opened, note the reason (space, no need, could not reach it)
____	____	____
____	____	____
____	____	____
____	____	____
____	____	____
____	____	____

Do not thin the bag on one data point. Write the hazard and the number of nights at the top of this block, because the next event may be a different shape. Ready.gov’s pets page says to have two kits, a larger one for sheltering in place and a lightweight one for evacuating, and to review them regularly so contents, especially foods and medicines, stay fresh. An item that never got opened may belong in the larger kit, not out of the house. The go-bag math page works the per-animal quantities for the lightweight half.

Block E. What you reached for and could not find

The object, the place you looked, and where it actually was.

What you needed	Where you looked for it	Where it actually was, or note that it was not in the house
____	____	____
____	____	____
____	____	____
____	____	____
____	____	____

The third column is where the useful answer usually hides. “In the car,” “at the vet’s office,” “in an email I could not open,” and “in the house we could not get back into” are different problems with different fixes, and only one is solved by moving something to a different shelf.

Block F. The animals, containers and vehicle

Containers and vehicles, recorded as objects rather than as conduct.

Field	Fill in
Which animal went into which container, and which container it was	____
Did every animal have its own carrier	____
Did any carrier have to serve both as vehicle transport and as the animal’s housing where you stayed	____
Any container that would not fit the vehicle, the room, or the animal	____
Any animal that could not be located when it was time to go, and where it turned out to be	____
Restraint or containment used in the vehicle	____
What you would move to a different vehicle position next time, and why	____

Two published documents to check this block against. NASAAEP’s 2023 Household Pet Evacuation and Transportation best practices, written for emergency planners, says owners should have a transport carrier small enough to be put in a vehicle and a sheltering carrier “big enough for the household pet to stand up in and turn around.” It also says to encourage residents to plan for all their animals, including household pets and service animals. Most households own one carrier per animal, not two, and find the gap on the first night in a room. Ready.gov’s pets page asks for a traveling bag, crate or sturdy carrier, ideally one for each pet; the hedge is Ready.gov’s own.

On the fifth row, the animal that could not be found: Ready.gov’s pre-event instruction is “Make note of where your pets hide, so you can easily find them in case you have to leave your house quickly.” If your answer is a place you did not know about, the row has done its whole job, and the fix is a note on the fridge, not a purchase. For a cat that hid successfully, the hiding and scared cat capture guide covers the confinement-first approach, and carrier training before hurricane season covers what the veterinary bodies publish about conditioning.

Block G. What the door asked for

Every place that took you in had requirements, and you now know them from the counter rather than from a website. This is the highest-value block for the household’s next event, and it is entirely about institutions.

Place (shelter, hotel, boarding, clinic, family)	What it asked for	Did you have it	How you produced it, or what you did instead
____	____	____	____
____	____	____	____
____	____	____	____

NASAAEP’s 2023 Mass Care and Sheltering best practices lists what an emergency animal shelter tries to capture at intake: species and breed or type, owner contact information, vaccination status if known, microchip information (universal scanners should be used whenever possible), a photograph preferably with the owner, and physical, medical and behavioral status. It adds that standard intake forms have been adopted by most national animal rescue and shelter organizations. That list is written for the people running the shelter, not as a checklist of what you must produce, but it shows what the far side of the counter needs. The page on what a pet shelter checks at intake covers the documents in detail, including why a rabies tag is not the certificate.

If a co-located or cohabitated shelter was involved, add two rows. The same NASAAEP document says the owner should be given a written copy of the rules and owner responsibilities, and that signed agreements are generally used between owners and the sheltering organization. Record whether you were given the written copy and whether you still have the signed agreement. Both are documents about your animal.

Block H. Records, identification and the contact chain

Field	Fill in
Which records you had with you, and in what form (paper, phone, cloud, memory)	____
Any record you could not open because of no signal, no power or a forgotten password	____
Was the microchip number written somewhere you could reach without the internet	____
Whose phone number is on the microchip registration, and is it still that person’s number	____
Out-of-area contact used, and whether they were reachable	____
Photo of you with each animal: did you have one, and where was it stored	____

Ready.gov’s pets page covers both halves. On identification, it says to have your pet microchipped, keep your address and phone number up to date, and include an emergency contact outside your immediate area. On the photograph, it asks for a picture of you and your pet together, which helps document ownership and lets others help identify your pet if you are separated.

NASAAEP’s household-pet document adds a limit owners rarely consider. It calls microchipping the most widely accepted form of permanent identification for household pets, and says identifying them by microchip requires a scanning device. Most microchip companies provide tags with the microchip number and the company’s toll-free number, an additional method when no scanner is available. A chip needs someone holding a scanner; a tag needs someone holding a phone. If the third and fourth rows came back wrong, the microchip registration audit fixes them and has a twenty-minute version.

Block I. The buddy arrangement, tested for the first time

Ready.gov’s pets page lists this as a planning item: “Develop a buddy system.” That means planning with neighbors, friends or relatives so someone can care for or evacuate your pets if you cannot. Almost nobody tests it until an event tests it for them.

Field	Fill in
Did a buddy arrangement exist before this event	____
Was it activated	____
Could that person physically reach the property	____
Did they have what they needed to get in and to handle the animals	____
Do your animals know that person well enough to be picked up by them	____
Who the arrangement is with now, and what they would need next time	____

The fifth row is the Irvine and Andre point about trust, and it quietly voids many arrangements. It reflects on nobody: an animal that will not be handled by a near-stranger is behaving normally. This block records an arrangement, not a person’s conduct. If it was not activated, or the person could not get through a closure, or nobody was asked, those are facts about access and logistics. There is no field for what somebody else should have done.

Block J. The one clock, and it is optional

Fill this in only if the household actually loaded and left. If you were not home, if the road was closed, or if the order arrived after you were already out, skip this block. It is not a gap in your record.

Field	Fill in
Time the household decided to go	____
Time the vehicle was moving	____
Elapsed	____
What accounted for most of that span	____

There is no target. The pet fire evacuation drill checklist states that no fire authority it cites publishes a target evacuation time for pets, and this page gives none either.

This number is an input, not a verdict. It goes into the leave-by arithmetic on the how early to leave with pets page as your household’s real loading span, replacing whatever you had assumed. A household that assumed twenty minutes and took an hour has not failed at anything. Its leave-by decision should simply be made earlier, which is a scheduling change, not a personal one.

It is not a measure of anything about the animals. There is deliberately no field for how long an animal was alone or waited. Those numbers do not improve a plan and they read as an indictment on a page that is not entitled to issue one.

Block K. Costs and paperwork to chase

No amounts, just a list of what to pursue and who to ask.

What was paid for or promised	Who to contact about it	Documentation you have	Status
____	____	____	____
____	____	____	____
____	____	____	____

Block L. The three changes

Not thirty. Three. HSEEP calls the equivalent output corrective actions and asks that they be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound; for a household the useful part is the last word.

The change	Who is doing it	Date it will be done by	Done
____	____	____	____
____	____	____	____
____	____	____	____

If any of the three is “buy something,” first write down what document, arrangement or enrollment would solve the same problem, because most are free. Enrolling in a county alert system is free. Correcting a microchip registration’s phone number is usually a login. Writing the hiding places on a card and taping it inside a cupboard costs a card.

What the sheet leaves out, and why

A debrief format is accusatory by design, and copying an organizational template unchanged is the quickest route to a sheet nobody can safely fill in. So:

• No “what went wrong” heading and no “why” column. HSEEP’s own reconstruction step is not concerned with why. If the federal doctrine for professional exercises separates the factual account from the causal one, a household sheet has no business merging them.
• No outcome field for the animals. No row gets filled in with an injury or a death. That would convert a logistics record into a memorial nobody asked this page to write; the support routes above are the right destination for that.
• No prompt about what a neighbor, sitter or relative failed to do. The Marshall Fire study includes cases where an arrangement did not hold. Inviting that answer onto a printable creates a document about another person, with no support attached and no right of reply. Block I asks what the arrangement was and what it needs, and stops there.
• No score, percentage or comparison, and no timing on the animals.
• No deadline as an obligation. There is a practical case for doing this while receipts, texts and photos are to hand. We attribute no week, or any other interval, to FEMA or any agency for households.

Questions this record raises for your county, not for you

Several blocks will produce answers no household can fix alone. Those are questions with an office attached. Two come from the NASAAEP household-pet document, which tells emergency planners what they should have built before you needed it.

Is there a mechanism for animals left behind? NASAAEP says that if owners evacuate without their pets and it is unsafe to retrieve them, planners should provide a way to register them and get a signed release for later entry to rescue or care for them. It gives the safety reason: owners may put themselves and responders in danger by returning to unsafe areas, and “animal retrieval will only be conducted by agencies with jurisdictional responsibility.” Whether your county runs such a registration is a question to ask now, in daylight. The pages on requesting a pet welfare check or rescue and re-entry access to a closed zone cover the two routes that exist when you are outside a closure and the animal is inside it.

Does the local plan expect you at a pickup point? NASAAEP’s best-practice box says to pre-identify pet owners who have neither transport nor sheltering resources and direct them to pre-determined sites where they can be picked up and taken to co-located or cohabitated shelters or, if needed, stand-alone shelters. It illustrates this with New Orleans, where residents needing transportation assistance pre-register their household including pets. That is one city’s program described in a national document, not a service that exists everywhere. The only way to know whether your jurisdiction runs anything comparable is to ask.

Will people and animals be kept together? NASAAEP says: “Separation of household pets and owners should be avoided.” The next sentence decides what happens on the day: “However, human resource needs will need to be prioritized in challenging incidents.” It goes on to describe Hurricane Gustav, where large pets were separated from owners at parish collection sites, given unique animal IDs linking each pet to its owner, and moved on separate transport. That “should be avoided” is a planning preference with a stated exception, and a household separated from an animal at a collection point was inside the exception, not outside the rule. If your county has no pet facility at all, when your county has no pet-friendly shelter builds the private-destination ladder instead.

Write the answers to those three questions on the back of the sheet. The phone call takes less time than filling in Block G did.

What the record feeds

A filled-in sheet is worth the afternoon only if something downstream reads it.

• The kit. Blocks D and E feed the next kit revision. Hand maintenance back to the calendar: the kit rotation checklist owns what expires and when.
• The clock. Block J’s elapsed time replaces an assumption inside how early to leave with pets, and resets the baseline in the pet fire evacuation drill, which builds its target from your own first run.
• The vehicle. Block F feeds the evacuation vehicle load planner and, if you have more animals than hands, the grab-order framework.
• The paperwork. Blocks G and H feed the microchip registration audit and the paper versus digital records comparison. If the record existed but you could not open it, that comparison owns the problem.

Two pages cover what this sheet does not. Returning home with pets after a disaster is the hazard sequence to run before the animal comes out of the car. Pet behavior changes after a disaster covers the weeks after; if something in Block F was about an animal that is still not itself, read that page.

The version you do in twenty minutes

If the full sheet is more than you have in you, write four things on one piece of paper. One: which channel the order reached you on, and whether you were signed up for your county’s system. Two: the single item you reached for and could not find. Three: the single thing a counter asked for that you did not have. Four: one thing that worked. Then do the one action those four imply, and stop. The four-line version filed in a drawer beats the twelve-block version you meant to do.

Your after-action checklist

• Print the sheet and fill in Block A, strengths, before anything else.
• Record how the instruction reached you and whether you were enrolled in the county’s opt-in system. Write the enrollment link on the sheet.
• List what you carried and never opened, with the hazard and number of nights at the top.
• List what you reached for and could not find, and where it actually was.
• Record which container each animal travelled in, and whether one carrier had to serve as both vehicle transport and housing at the other end.
• Record what every door asked for, whether you had it, and what you did instead. Keep any written rules or signed agreement you were given.
• Check that the microchip registration carries a phone number somebody answers, and that the number is written where you can read it without the internet.
• Record whether a buddy arrangement existed, whether it was activated, and whether your animals would let that person handle them.
• Fill in the optional elapsed time only if the household actually loaded and left. Skipping is not a gap.
• Write three changes with a name and a date against each, and check whether an enrollment or a document solves any of them without a purchase.
• Ask your county the three questions on the back of the sheet: retrieval mechanism, pickup points, and whether people and animals are kept together.
• File the sheet with your pet records.

Where to go next

This page is the after-the-event record in our pet evacuation kits cluster, inside the wider pet emergency playbooks hub.

The maintenance half. The kit rotation checklist asks what aged out; this page asked what failed. Run both.

The rehearsal half. The pet fire evacuation drill checklist is the same record built from a rehearsal instead of an event, at no risk. The T-minus storm countdown card and the hurricane season pet prep calendar put pre-event actions on dates.

The documents half. The pet emergency binder is where the filled-in sheet goes, and the DIY go-bag checklist is what Blocks D and E are editing.

If the review is not really what you came for. If an animal is still missing, how to find a lost pet after a disaster is the workflow. If an animal did not come home, what happens with remains and what the options are is written for that, and this printable is not.

Once the sheet is filled in, do one thing off it this week: the enrollment, the phone number, the card taped inside the cupboard. The record is worth keeping on its own, and nobody should promise it changes the next event. What it reliably does is put the three or four facts you paid for in the worst week of your year somewhere other than your memory.

These routes are open right now. SAMHSA Disaster Distress Helpline: call or text 1-800-985-5990. 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline: call 988, text 988, or chat at 988lifeline.org. Veterans Crisis Line: dial 988 then press 1, or text 838255. Talking to a licensed professional is a reasonable next step.