By Tillie Fong
Rocky Mountain News
WESTMINSTER, Colo. — For a Westminster firefighter, the early morning rescue of a poodle trapped in a melting pond was an opportunity to break the ice, so to speak, on ice rescues.
Westminster firefighter Ronnie Taylor’s first ice rescue happened Monday as he pulled a standard poodle named Charlie Brown to safety from a pond after the dog had run out onto the ice to chase geese.
“It was my responsibility to put on the equipment and go out and get the dog,” Taylor said of the 3-year-old chocolate poodle.
“The firemen were just wonderful,” said Karen Diaz, 58, of Westminster, Charlie Brown’s owner. “There was no way that I could rescue my dog. I’m so happy that they were willing to do it - they train for rescues like that.”
At 7:45 a.m. Monday, Diaz, a special-education teacher with the Adams County School District 50, had left her house to go on her daily two-mile run with Charlie Brown near the Hyland Hills golf course.
Diaz was approaching a small hill near the eighth hole and was holding the leash loosely in her hand when Charlie Brown unexpectedly took off.
“I proceeded down the hill and I thought he would come back and follow me,” she said. “I called him a couple of times, but he didn’t appear, so I went running back up the hill.”
She looked for Charlie Brown, and was surprised to see where he was. “There was Charlie in the middle of the pond, and there were geese squawking at him all around him,” she said.
“I don’t know if he slid in the water, but the middle wasn’t frozen, and the geese were walking all around him.”
Diaz’s first thought was: “What in the world am I going to do? I knew if I went away, he would be even more frantic,” she said.
But she remembered that she had run by a neighbor, Dave Wood, on the trail earlier, and he soon caught up with her. He went back to his house, which was nearby, and called 911.
When Ladder 2 truck responded, Taylor saw that Charlie Brown was mostly submerged in the water, with only his head and front paws clinging to the ice.
“Animal control was already there, but the dog was too far out for them to get him out of the pond,” Taylor said. “He had been in the water for about 20 minutes.”
After putting on a Mustang suit, which insulates a person from the cold water, Taylor went out on the ice, with a rope attached to him.
“I walked out as far as I could go, got low and made it to the dog,” he said.
When he reached Charlie Brown, the dog was calm as the firefighter grabbed him by the scruff of his neck. “He seem to understand that I was there to help him,” recalled Taylor, who held the dog as other firefighters pulled him back to shore.
Lt. David Varney said Charlie Brown may have been suffering from hypothermia when he was brought up.
“When he got up on the ice, he couldn’t stand,” he said. “After we dragged him in, we threw a bunch of towels and blankets on him, we put him in the (fire) truck, and he warmed up.”
Firefighters gave both Diaz and Charlie Brown a ride home.
Varney had nothing but praise for Taylor’s first ice rescue. “He did exceptionally well,” he said. “It was textbook.”
Diaz said once Charlie Brown was home, she used towels and a hair dryer to dry him off, and he seemed none the worse for wear.
“Within a half hour or so of getting home, he went upstairs to eat,” she said.
Copyright 2008 Denver Publishing Company