Kitten Stuck Inside a Wall Has Purr-fect Rescue by Florida Firefighters
Firefighters were able to locate the kitten by the sound of its meowing.
— -- One lucky kitten got a purr-fect ending after becoming trapped inside a wall of a Deerfield Beach, Florida, home.
“The family said they had heard the meowing coming from the wall for about two days so they called us,” Mike Jachles, the public information officer for the Broward Sheriff's Office Department of Fire Rescue, told ABC News.
After unsuccessful attempts at using a thermal-imaging camera to locate the kitten behind the wall, they were able to find it using a more old-fashioned method.
“We have a thermal-imaging camera that we usually use on fires that senses heat, so we tried to use that to find the cat, but that didn’t work too well, so we just listened for the cat in the wall and zeroed in on where we thought it would be and put a hole in the wall with a hammer and reached in and got it out,” Brian Baker, one of the firefighters who helped rescue the kitten, told ABC affiliate WPLG.
The rescuers successfully retrieved the cute kitten, who is now named Hugo after another one of the firefighters on the scene.
“What we presume happened is the mother cat had the kitten up in the attic of the house,” Jachles explained. “In the attic there are voids in the walls where the dry wall is, and the kitten presumably fell down in between the two walls in a void space. We think he got stuck on a fire stop between the walls.”
“We immediately game him a bath because he was covered in dust,” one of the homeowners, Kendra Van Metre, said. “Once we got him dried off he was so, so loving. And we gave him some food because he was so hungry.”
Van Metre says the kitten has already been adopted out to a loving family.
“A woman saw the article on Facebook and said she was more than happy to take him,” Van Metre explained. “She came by last night around 11:30 and got the cat and she immediately fell in love. She said, ‘He’s finally got a forever home.’”