Crime & Safety
Firefighters Rescue Dogs From East Rock Cliff
A firefighter rappelled 40 feet down the cliff face of East Rock Park to rescue two identical small white dogs that were stranded on a ledge
By Thomas Breen, New Haven Independent
NEW HAVEN, CT — City firefighter Matt Walsh rappelled 40 feet down the cliff face of East Rock Park Sunday afternoon to fetch two identical small white dogs that were stranded on a “little ledge.”
The dogs’ owner was nowhere in sight, according to Assistant Fire Chief Daniel Coughlin. And firefighters had “no idea how they [the dogs] got there.”
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The fire department found out about the wayward pups thanks to a call that came in at 4:47 p.m. Sunday. “Somebody hiking in the park happened to notice these two dogs,” Coughlin said told the Independent on Monday.
Coughlin said the dogs were the same color, same breed, though he didn’t know what type. (This reporter’s guess: Cockapoo?)
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There were no humans nearby when firefighters responded, “so we began a high-angle rope rescue.” That’s “one of our most dangerous operations,” Coughlin said.
“We lowered one New Haven firefighter,” Walsh, down about 40 feet from near the summit of the park. “He got the first dog, put him in a mesh bag, and brought him up to the top of the mountain.”
Walsh was then lowered down again and repeated that rescue operation for the second dog.
The whole rescue took around an hour and 20 minutes.
There were no injuries, Coughlin reported. “The dogs were fine.” The firefighters turned the dogs over to animal control.
“We had obvious concerns about where the owner was,” Coughlin said, so a second firefighter scanned the area while a drone with “thermal-energy capabilities” also looked for any potentially missing people. “Everything came back clean,” Coughlin said. No humans were found.
There were also no IDs on the dogs’ collars.
“We couldn’t be prouder of them,” Coughlin said of the firefighters who rescued the dogs. “It was a really, really well-run operation.”
City police spokesperson Officer Christian Bruckhart told the Independent that, according to the city’s animal control officer, as of around 4 p.m. Monday, the dogs had not been claimed and “we do not know who the owners are.”
The New Haven Independent is a not-for-profit public-interest daily news site founded in 2005.
