By Amanda Codispoti
The Roanoke Times
Roanoke, Va. — Molly Mae, a longhaired Chihuahua, was gasping for air when Roanoke fire Lt. Jeremy Bennington found her in a burning home’s second-floor bedroom.
Once outside, Lt. Chuck Sharp fitted a specially designed oxygen mask over Molly Mae’s tiny snout.
“It was almost dead,” he said. “Honestly, I didn’t think the dog was going to make it.”
After 40 minutes on oxygen, Molly Mae resumed running around her yard, Sharp said.
Roanoke County rescue workers joined their Roanoke colleagues Tuesday with a donated supply of animal oxygen masks designed to save pets as small as ferrets or as large as Great Danes. The masks, now on fire trucks in Roanoke and Roanoke County, were donated by Invisible Fence Brand of Virginia. Roanoke County fires this year have killed six dogs and two cats, said department spokeswoman Jennifer Conley Sexton.
Statistics on the deaths of pets in house fires nationwide aren’t kept. Industry estimates put the annual death toll in the tens of thousands. In the past, firefighters have administered oxygen to animals by using human masks. But those masks are ineffective because they don’t fit well over dogs’ long snouts and are too big for smaller animals.
Two dogs from the Roanoke Valley SPCA, Haley, a 4-month-old mixed-breed puppy, and Happy, an Akita mix, were at a news conference Tuesday to demonstrate the new cone-shaped masks.
Molly Mae’s story isn’t so cheery. The dog survived her initial smoke inhalation but died three days later from neurological damage related to the fire, owner Ashley Adams said.
“The EMS and fire department did a fantastic job,” Adams said in an e-mail. “I couldn’t thank them enough for the heroic job that they did.”
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