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An unseen kitten heard meowing from an unknown location in someone’s home was traced to a bathroom vent and rescued from the building’s attic.
Fort Lauderdale, Florida firefighters responded to a call about the mystery cat and made the rescue, then took the young kitten to the shelter for care. Firefighter Eric Fillyaw rescued the kitten.
Fort Lauderdale Fire Rescue told of the rescue at Facebook Tuesday, writing: “Engine 3 responded to a kitten stuck in a bathroom pipe. On investigation they found the kitten stuck in the bathroom vent. Firefighter Fillyaw went into the attic and took the vent apart and rescued the kitten. We brought the kitten to the Broward Animal Control Adoption Center where the kitten will be placed into foster care and nursed back to health for future adoption.”
ABC News covered the story and provided more details, saying that when the woman who heard the meows coming from some unknown place in her apartment, seemingly from the bathroom, she initially thought a kitten might be stuck in her drain. After her landlord suggested running the water to flush the kitten out she called for help.
“We were all standing in the bathroom and you could hear it, and we were asking each other, ‘Where is that coming from?,” Fort Lauderdale Fire Rescue public information officer, Greg May, said. “We isolated it to what we thought was the attic. We popped open the vent fan and it was meowing and we just couldn’t get it to come to us.”
Firefighters had to go door-to-door in search of an apartment with access to the attic, where the kitten was trapped.
“We searched all around banging on each door,” said May. “We woke the homeowner up and said, ‘Hey listen, we need to get into the attic space. And sure enough, the kitten was hiding up there. There was a vent pipe isolated off to the side and the kitten got up there and fell down into the vent.”
As seen in the raw video footage below, firefighter Eric Fillyaw crawled into the attic space and rescued the kitten.
“It was a little kitten in bad shape,” May said. “All its claws were gnawed down to the nubs because it had been trying to claw out.”
Fire Rescue took the small black kitten, who they called Piper, to Broward County Animal Care, where arrangements were made to transfer him to the Humane Society of Broward County. The humane society will provide kitty with medical care and make him available for adoption when he is old enough and big enough.
Lisa Mendheim from Broward County Animal Care told ABC News: “You could tell he definitely needed a good meal and some water. He’ll be fine. He just needs to beef it up a little bit.”
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Watch the raw video of officer Fillyaw getting kitty down from the vent and taking him to the shelter:
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