“I know that this particular home, they have a few dogs, and I just came around the corner there where they live and I saw the shed on fire,” Thompson told the Daily Reporter. “I thought, ‘I just gotta check, just in case.’”
Sure enough, Thompson heard puppies whimpering from inside the burning shed. She reached for the door, but it was locked. Thompson ran to a nearby barn and grabbed a shovel to knock the door in.
“When I couldn’t get that lock off; I tried to kick the board in,” she said. “I tried everything; I just had to get them out. They were crying, and that was just the awfulest thing I ever heard.”
One pup was at the door, screaming loudly, Thompson said. When she finally got through, she found most of the puppies huddled in a corner, tucked away from the heat lamp that apparently had ignited straw inside the structure.
Thompson brought all nine healthy puppies to her vehicle to wait for the Buck Creek Volunteer Fire Department to arrive. Chief David Sutherlin said the dogs would not have survived had it not been for Thompson’s quick thinking.
“It was a very small building, but it was a very intense fire,” Sutherlin recalled. “(By) the time we got there, the roof had burned off of it. A very good portion of the roof and much of the sides were gone by the time we got there and started putting water on it.
Mail carrier adopts puppy she rescued from fire | wlfi.com