NEWS AND COMMENT-SINGAPORE: This is an exceptional firefighter cat rescue story in that, in all, 14 domestic cats were found on the floor in a Housing and Development Board (HDB) apartment which was filled with dense smoke when 20 responders including firefighters entered. The occupiers of the apartment and the owners of the cats were not present.
The fire was confined to the apartment’s service yard and was put out by the firefighters led by Lt Oh and Cpl Marco Lim. We are told that they could barely walk on the floor because there were so many cats laid out. The cats were dying basically and they arrived in the nick of time.
Three of the cats required CPR. They used the same technique they used on babies using two fingers rather than a hand to restart the heart. Apparently, all the cats received oxygen resuscitation. Of the 14, one cat died because they didn’t respond to CPR.
They had to use a thermal imaging camera to detect the cats in the dense smoke. Firefighters are not trained to give medical aid animals but they are trained to perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) on small children.
Three of the firefighters used the same technique on the three cats. SSG Yazid said: “After a while, I could feel the breath starting to come out of the cat’s mouth, and I could feel its pulse.”
The Straits Times is the source of the story and they said that they visited the apartment on April 22 and spoke to the occupier, namely Madam Azizah and her husband. They confirmed that they owned the flat and the cats. She declined to give her full name. She was extremely grateful to the firefighters for saving her cats which she described as her family.
“I’m really grateful for their compassion and quick thinking. They didn’t care that these were animals; they only thought about saving lives,” she said.
The story is unique in one aspect: the very large number of cats that required oxygen resuscitation and also the three cats that required CPR – all at the same time and in the same place. It is, at the end of the day, a good cat new story because all but one survived and may the one that passed away rest in peace.
Below is an FB post of the rescue. These sometimes disappear over time because they are deleted on Facebook. This is an embedded version of that Facebook post.
