Rescuers Rush To Save 6 Dogs Trapped in Kennel as Flood Waters Quickly Rise
As someone who lived on the lengthy American peninsula known as the Sunshine State, let me tell you that hurricanes are not fun. Every few years, one of them gathers force and smacks into Florida.
Now hurricanes aren’t usually anywhere as dramatically devastating as, say, tornadoes. Their real power lies in their tenacity.
A hurricane can batter a big area for day after day, buffeting it with sustained high winds until things start to break. And then there’s the rain.
As North Carolina residents have learned over the past few days, that unending precipitation can cause problems all on its own. Tropical Storm Florence has dumped water over the states, filling low-lying areas and completely submerging roads.
The News & Observer reported that the city of Wilmington, North Carolina, was completely cut off as of September 17; all of its highways and byways were under water.
This causes major pain not only for people and property, but also for pets. A small group of do-gooders in Leland, North Carolina, would quickly learn how much pain.
According to KDVR, one of the people was Marcus DiPaola, a freelance journalist. What he found was something absolutely chilling.
An owner of six dogs had left them behind while fleeing the storm. However, the owner had first locked them into an outdoor kennel — a kennel with a door made of chain-link mesh.
“Rescued six dogs in Leland, NC, after the owner LEFT THEM locked in an outdoor cage that filled with flood water that was rapidly rising,” DiPaola wrote on Twitter. “We got them out, but by the time we left, the water was so high that they would have drowned.
Rescued six dogs in Leland, NC, after the owner LEFT THEM locked in an outdoor cage that filled with flood water that was rapidly rising.
We got them out, but by the time we left, the water was so high that they would have drowned. BRING YOUR PETS WITH YOU! #HurricaneFlorence pic.twitter.com/tRibGxCjXy
— Marcus J. DiPaola (@marcusdipaola) September 16, 2018
NBC News said that another pair of men, Ryan Nichols and David Rebollar, helped DiPaola save the dogs.
Notably, Nichols and Rebollar aren’t even from North Carolina. They’re from Houston, Texas, and after Hurricane Harvey flooded their city, they decided “when we see a hurricane, we’re going to help.”
Nichols said they’d managed to help upwards of 30 people, “including a five-week-old” infant. He and Rebollar agreed to take DiPaola along on one condition: “If you’re going to go with us, you got to work.”
And work he did, including helping with people and pooches. He explained in an interview that those dogs in the backyard wouldn’t have lasted long if they hadn’t gotten there when they did.
“The dogs were almost underwater,” he said. “Within an hour, they would have been dead.”
People were quick to criticize the canines’ owners on social media. Yet Nichols pointed out that the situation was more than it appeared to be.
The family had fled in a panic as the storm hit. Their reason why? They had an 8-month-old child.
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