Firefighters make rare cat rescue call
Published: January 16, 2007
Residents in the 300 block of North Madison Street are no longer scratching their heads trying to figure out how to get down the cat stuck up in a tree.
The Janesville Fire Department rescued it Saturday morning, but don’t expect that to be common practice.
“As a rule, we never go after cats because you’re risking machinery, personnel and taking a unit out of position to go get a cat,” said Shift Commander Stephen Ballou.
The department stopped fetching cats years ago, Ballou said, because “if you leave them alone, they come down on their own. It’s when people go after them they get higher and then they actually do get trapped.”
Still, Ballou made the decision Saturday morning to have the cat rescued.
“It’d been four days and the people said the cat was screaming,” he said.
The rescue took about 10 minutes and involved Engine 81-a ladder truck. The ladder, holding one firefighter, was raised 60 feet into the tree-the height the cat had climbed to, Ballou said.
When the cat was brought down, it was let go, Ballou said.
Although the cat rescue didn’t cost anything in actual dollars, Ballou said the cost to his department was risk.
“It’s a horrible risk for me to make that decision and take that engine out. What if there was a fire or heart attack a block away? Then we would have been on Madison Street with the ladder up,” he said.
On the other hand, Ballou said: “I can look at it as training-to put the ladder up.”
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