The very same day two Dachshunds miraculously survived a house fire in Pennsylvania, three Standard Poodles in Illinois miraculously survived when the house they lived in blew up due to a natural gas leak.
As with the Dachshunds, the Poodles were initially thought to have been killed Saturday. The three dogs were in kennels in the basement of the house in Caseyville, and had no way of escaping. The homeowner and his son and daughter-in-law, who are Poodle breeders, were not home at the time of the explosion.
“If anyone had been inside, they would not have survived,” Hollywood Heights Fire Dept. Chief Buddy Moore told KTVI Saturday.
Sunday afternoon, next-door neighbor Larry Arnold — who happens to work for the fire department — was in his front yard, talking to other neighbors, when he heard something.
“I said, ‘Shut up, you guys, I hear those dogs crying,’” Arnold told the Belleville News-Democrat. “They said I was crazy. We walked over there and those dogs got real quiet because they must have been scared. But then they started barking.”
Arnold called Moore, and six firefighters soon arrived with a backhoe to dig out the Poodles. About two feet of water covered the basement floor.
St. Clair County Emergency Management Agency Director Herb Simmons told the News-Democrat one of the kennels had been partially crushed. Firefighters cut it open to rescue the Poodle inside it.
“I couldn’t believe they were still alive because of the explosion, the heat of the fire and then they almost drowned,” Arnold told the News-Democrat. “But it was probably the water that saved them from the heat.”
A fourth dog, thought to be an Australian Shepherd, ran out of the house after the explosion, neighbor Darlene Jonas told the News-Democrat. That dog has not been found.