In the next major disaster that strikes, one aspect of recovery should face better odds, thanks to a team of computer scientists at the University of Colorado — locating lost pets.

It is not, as Mario Barrenechea, a doctoral student in software engineering at CU put it, a “toy problem.”

It has been estimated that in Hurricane Katrina in 2005, some 70,000 pets were separated from their owners and only 3 percent were reunited. And, research has shown that the loss of pets, including service animals, can have a significant impact on people, particularly vulnerable populations such as the disabled or elderly.

Introducing, as soon as the next appropriate calamity is at hand, the online EmergencyPetMatcher.

Barrenechea said the idea sprang from CU’s Project EPIC — it stands for Empowering the Public with Information in Crisis — that is based in the university’s College of Engineering and Applied Science.

“Back in 2011, we had been thinking a lot about, and we still think about, what digital volunteerism has brought to disaster events,” said Barrenechea. “There’s about 100 years of sociology that goes into what people do, when disaster strikes.”

Increasingly, he said, what people are doing is going to social media, such as Facebook, and establishing task-specific pages to solve problems or meet needs that arise.

“So we thought, let’s build something that uses the crowd and uses digital volunteerism to solve an important problem,” Barrenechea said. “We decided, let’s build a Website that can organize the tasks required, to report lost pets, pet owners who have lost their pets, and people who find pets in the rubble or around the neighborhood.”

The EmergencyPetMatcher website, which recently received its final institutional review approvals, is poised for deployment during the next disaster. It will enable anyone to go online and create reports of lost and found pets, and also propose matches between photographs of lost and found pets

Those suggested matches can be voted up or down by Website users. When a match gets enough “up” votes, an email will then be sent to the people who posted both photos, recommending they get in touch with one another.

“It’s crowd work, rather than crowdsourcing. Crowd work is a bottom-up spontaneous arrangement of people and information to solve a problem, whereas crowdsourcing is, “I have a big problem, and I’m breaking it off piece by piece for people to solve on their own,” Barrenechea said.

Another team member, Joanne White, is a doctoral candidate at the ATLAS institute in CU’s College of Engineering and Applied Science.

“My dissertation looks at how people make decisions during disasters, dependent on what happens with their animals, and we all know a lot of people will choose to evacuate or not evacuate based on how they see their animal is going to be cared for,” said White. “So it’s a human safety issue as well as a non-human safety issue. They’re all tied together.”

After Katrina, Congress passed legislation called the Pets Evacuation and Transportation Standards Act, requiring states wanting access to federal emergency disaster funds to accommodate pets in their evacuation plans.

White noted that according to the National Guard, which led the massive air-lift effort after the Colorado flood of September 2013, 3,500 people and over 1,300 pets were evacuated by air and ground. The guard also found that many people said they would not evacuate without their pets.

White said the PETS Act was one of the most swiftly-enacted pieces of legislation in history; it passed in the House of Representatives 349 to 29 in 2006. However, she added, “It doesn’t have any component to enable people to get back with their owners, if they do become separated during that process.”

EmergencyPetMatcher.com is not yet a functioning public site, but it will be activated, and publicized through social media and other channels, when the next disaster for which it is suitable inevitably strikes.

“Unfortunately it’s horrible, but on a global basis, there is never any shortage of disasters,” White said. “We are likely to deploy it in an event such as the Colorado floods, or a wildfire, as we come into the fire season.”

The site, to which CU graduate student Joshua Barron was also a key contributor, was a top-four finalist among more than 60 entries in the Student Design Competition at the 2012 Computer Human Interaction conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Charlie Brennan: 303-473-1327, brennanc@dailycamera.com or twitter.com/chasbrennan