Paul Bass Photo
Firefighters of the Week Matt Kennedy, Jose Maldonado, Tommy Michaels, & Troy Adams.
Oh no, Lt. Tommy Michaels said. I’m not climbing into some water-filled sewer to grab a hidden kitten.
Michaels knew that his friend on the police force, Lt. Holly Wasilewski, had done that the week before. She and fellow cops and firefighters spent more than two hours rescuing a kitten in the Hill. He’d razzed her about it. Firefighters don’t usually end up rescuing cats in New Haven. They rescue people.
Then a call came in around 10 p.m. Monday night: A kitten was reported trapped underneath Winchester Avenue in the Newhallville neighborhood.
Michaels, who was in charge of the crew at Dixwell’s Goffe Street station during that shift, laughed about it with his fellow firefighters. “Feline frenzy,” he called it.
But in no time he, Matt Kennedy, Jose Maldonado, and Troy Adams were on the scene with their ladder truck. And a half-dozen sad-looking little kids were on the street beseeching them for help.
How could they not do what it took to rescue that kitten?
Michaels peered down six feet into the dark of the storm sewer. He considered imitating Wasilewski and spending an hour standing hunched over in the water.
There had to be another way.
Michaels may not be an animal lover like Wasilewski. Growing up on Long Island, he had a different passion: playing games at an arcade on Hempstead Turnpike.
That arcade touch would prove felicitous for the feline on Winchester Avenue.
Tuna Lure
The fire crew shined a flashlight down into the sewer. No sign of the kitty.
Michaels knew that a separate pipe branched off from the sewer, connecting to other pipes around the city. The kitten, he figured, “could have been in Massachusetts for all I knew.”
Then one of the little girls on the street stepped forward. “He hasn’t eaten,” she said of the kitten. She brought a can of tuna fish. Kennedy threw a piece into the hole.
Out popped a little kitten head from the connecting pipe.
“Oh! There he is,” someone said.
The kitten pawed at the tuna. The firefighters got to work.
Kennedy made a loose noose from some rope. He knelt by the side of the drain and lowered it. Maldonado held the flashlight so everyone could watch. Kennedy almost got the rope around the kitten’s neck. Then it slipped off.
Michaels had an idea. “I didn’t want to waste all the tuna,” he figured. “He [the kitten] was going for it.”
So Michaels retrieved a plastic tarp from the ladder truck. He lowered it “like a sling” in the drain. Kennedy and Maldonado held the sides of the tarp as Michaels threw the rest of the canned tuna into the tarp.
The kitten approach the tuna. Michaels quickly lowered a slip knot, maneuvered it around the kitten’s neck, tried to slip it around the kitten’s paw as well.
“It was like one of those arcade games,” Michaels said.
The kitten slipped out of the noose again, but onto the tarp. Its footing was unsteady. “Pull it [the tarp] up quick!” Michaels said. Kennedy and Adams did. They wrapped the tiny shivering wet grayish-white kitten in a blanket (“It couldn’t have been more than four weeks old,” Michaels said), handed it to the girl, who like the rest of the kids was “ecstatic.”
“We did it for the kids,” Maldonado said.
“I hate to brag,” Michaels said. “But we did it in 25 minutes.”
Trees? No Problem
The Dixwell crew has had lots of practice rescuing humans from fires, but not rescuing cats. Monday night was Michaels’ first cat rescue in 17 years on the job. In fact, among the four firefighters, only Kennedy had responded to a cat-rescue call before.
And his crew that time ended up needing to rescue a firefighter, not the cat.
It happened about 10 years ago, Kennedy said. A cat was in a tree. One of his fellow firefighters “ran up a tree to impress some girls.”
The cat scratched the firefighter pretty bad. The firefighter got scared; his colleagues helped him down.
“They taught us in the academy: You never see cat bones in a tree. They always come down,” Kennedy said.
Sewers, on the other hand? Sometimes you need a firefighter after all.
Previous Firefighters of the Week:
Historically the fire department would be called to remove cats from the upper branches of trees...it is a human instinct for people to be concerned with the continious meow emanating from the the tree with a crowd of people standing by asking did someone call the fire department? Firefighters as a group are very talented and never turn their back on a challenge. I can remember the day when the NHFD responded to rescue a dog from a rooftop - this time is was a bark and not a meow. The dog had jumped out a window and landed on a roof. Support your firefighters because the cat they save just might be yours.