Firefighters rescue dog from drowning in icy Potomac pond

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/con...03467.html

By Dan Morse
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 14, 2010

A Potomac man looked out his kitchen window Friday afternoon and saw an animal in the middle of a pond surrounded by ice.
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"It looked like an otter," Tony Credico recalled. "Then it dawned on me: They're not around here."

Credico walked to his porch and looked to the pond 50 yards away. It was Tully, his neighbor's yellow Lab. He called 911.

Rescuers appeared minutes later and donned their water gear. They trudged through snow that was nearly up to their waists and used a knife to cut through a fence to get to the pond, which is near the 9000 block of Belmart Road.

Tully, 4, had been swimming around the pond, looking for an exit. At the ice's edges, he was too tired to raise his front paws, so he tried to rest his lower jaw on the ice, cutting himself slightly, said his owner, Bruce Stewart. And he kept slipping back into the water.

"Hold on there, buddy!" Stewart and his 14-year-old son Patrick yelled. "You're a good boy!"

As Rashad Surratt, a firefighter trained to pluck humans from the nearby Potomac River, entered the pond, Tully paddled toward him, Surratt said. The rescuer wrapped his arms and a harness around the dog, who quit moving. "He just gave up," Surratt said Saturday. "He was really, really tired."

Other firefighters were able to help pull Tully across the ice and get him to the shore. The dog, with his cream-colored coat soaking wet, had trouble standing. "Lots of whimpering, shivering, murmuring," Stewart said.

Stewart, an executive at text-messaging company kgb, figures Tully walked beyond his electronic fence, which had been disabled by the snow. Nearby lives Balto, an Alaskan malamute. "I think he said, 'I'm going to go visit my friend,' and wandered out onto the ice, and it broke," Stewart said.

Tully was wrapped in coats and blankets, loaded onto a toboggan and pulled home by firefighters and residents. The rescuers told the Stewarts not to submerge him in a hot bath because it might shock his system. They were advised to dry him off and wrap him in blankets, perhaps next to a fire.

"Best we can tell," Stewart said Friday, four hours after the rescue, "he's back to normal."