City rescues deer from wastewater pond
Published: September 22, 2006
Wednesday morning, as city wastewater treatment operators were making their daily rounds at the treatment plant, they noticed something in one of their treatment ponds that shouldn’t have been there.
Sometime during the night, a young doe had fallen into the treatment unit and had apparently been unable to get out, due to the steep slope around the unit.
“She’d probably been in there several hours, when we saw her,” Water Utilities Manager Russell Grubbs said. “She was awful tired.”
So the first question the wastewater staff had was “what now?”
That was the easy question — call for backup.
Sometimes, when animal control officers arrive on a scene like that, the solution might be to use a trank-gun to sedate the animal for everyone’s safety, but, according to Grubbs, they decided against it this time.
“We were afraid that if we did that, the deer would most likely drown before it could be rescued.”
Time for Plan B — and in Texas, any decent Plan B usually requires a lasso or rope of some sort.
Water Utility employees drove the young doe to an area where a rope could be thrown around her neck to help pull her free.
It worked.
They managed to get the doe up, out of the water — it didn’t put up much of a fight — and she was released, exhausted, but apparently unharmed.
Grubbs said it was fortunate that that particular treatment unit was out of service when the deer fell in.
If the city had been using the treatment unit — the water would not have had enough buoyancy to allow the animal to swim for any length of time.
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