All three of Santa Barbara County’s animal shelters are closed on Thursday after a power outage caused their internal processing system to fail Wednesday night. Their system is expected to be back up and running by 10 a.m. Friday.
The system outage affects adoptions, fostering, intakes, lost-pet reunification, and licensing but no physical operations have been affected. Staff were still able to go to work, and all animals are receiving care.
“We’re taking care of the animals. They’re getting out in the yards and getting fed,” said S.B. Public Health Department Public Information Assistant Eunice Valle.
The county Department of Public Health manages three animal shelters: Santa Barbara Shelter (5473 Overpass Rd., Goleta), Santa Maria Shelter (548 W. Foster Rd., Santa Maria), and Lompoc Shelter (1501 W. Central Ave., Lompoc). All three locations have been affected by the outage.
Although the outage hinders intakes, Valle said that people can still drop off animals or request stray pickups by calling ahead to the shelters.
According to Valle, a power outage affecting the Santa Barbara Shelter, where the computer system is headquartered, caused their processing systems to experience glitches. “There was a lot of back-end issues,” said Valle, which led the shelters to close to prospective adopters for the day as IT teams fix the issues.
