State College Firefighters Rescue Dog From 15-Foot Deep Sinkhole
STATE COLLEGE, Pa. (KDKA) -- Skye, a 7-year-old golden retriever, disappeared Monday night when her owner took her for a walk around an arboretum at Penn State.
She let the dog off her leash in a snowstorm, and Skye just vanished.
It was two days later when her owners heard her barking and realized the dog was at the bottom of a 15-foot deep sinkhole!
Members of the Alpha Fire Company arrived to see Skye staring back at them from the bottom of the hole.
They lowered a ladder down the hole and then Assistant Chief Dennis Harris carefully made his way down to the waiting dog.
"When I got down the hole, she came over to me right away and pawed up on me, stayed by me for the most part," said Harris.
He managed to get a harness on Skye which they improvised at the scene. What followed was a series of pushes and pulls from above, carefully navigating the hole as it narrowed back toward the ground surface.
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On video shot by the fire company, you can hear instructions from above: "Keep coming. Okay. Push the head of the dog up."
Eventually, Skye emerges from the hole. Wet, but clearly happy to be out of her predicament.
The dog's owner later posted on Facebook a picture of a dog next to a fireplace and thanked the fire department for saving the Skye.
