The Greater Moncton SPCA was one of several businesses that was affected by power outages across the region, as a result of high winds.
They went without electricity from 3pm Wednesday, until around 1pm on Thursday. afternoon.
Executive Director Dave Rogers says without heat, they put blankets in with the animals, and keep doors closed to try and keep the heat in, “It isn’t too cold inside the shelter yet. But we certainly couldn’t go several days without power.”
They also use handwarmers for the kittens and other sick animals, “What we do, is we activate the handwarmer and one of my staff has knitted little pouches for them to go in. We put them in the kennel with the kittens.”
Rogers says they are always in needs of donations of more handwarmers, in case the power does go out..
“We can’t do any business with the public when the power is off, because everything is so connected to computers. We wouldn’t be able to adopt animals out. We would be caring for animals and they could come look at them but we couldn’t do business,” Rogers says.
He says a generator isn’t realistic for the shelter, because they would need an industrial size one, and they are very expensive to maintain, “The initial cost of buying a generator and then there is an ongoing operational cost for maintaining a generator. I am not talking about a small generator that you would use for your house. We heat this building with a hot water boiler and some heat pumps, so we would have to have some sort of industrial generator. It would be very expensive to try and operate something like that.”
If the power went out for several days, in very cold weather, Rogers says unfortunately they would have to relocate the animals to keep them warm.