As Wildfire Roared, California Police Rushed to Save Animals in Shelter

A grass fire that erupted late last week in Vacaville, California, climbed the hills southwest of the city on Saturday and roared toward the SPCA of Solano County. Dozens of animals — dogs, cats and a handful of snakes and rodents — were in the path of the wildfire.

Officers Carly Stone and Kirsten Jennings were first to pull up outside the animal shelter on Saturday afternoon. They raced inside and started to round up animals, placing dogs on leashes and loading kittens into crates.

As flames roared several hundred feet away and smoke swirled above, they and several other officers guided the animals out of the shelter and into cars. Within 10 minutes, the police, as well as shelter employees and volunteers who joined in, had wrangled 60 animals and brought them to safety.

The dramatic rescue was captured on Stone’s body camera and shared on Facebook over the weekend. The footage, which she edited into a short video, showed officers sprinting to their police cars and placing animals in the back seat, front seat and anywhere they could fit.

“Get in, get in,” Stone told one dog, King, as she led him into her sport utility vehicle. “That’s a good dog.”

At the end of the video, Stone pulled away from the shelter, breathing heavily. She held a small dog in her lap.

“Even though the dogs had never met us before, and we were in a strange uniform, it was almost like they knew we were there to help them,” Stone said in an interview on Facebook with Anderson Cooper on Monday. “They came along with us because they knew that’s what they needed to do.”

After their rescue, the animals were taken to a parking lot outside a nearby grocery store, where people brought food, water and beds for them, police said. With the shelter closed, people offered to take some animals home for the night.

“We had an incredible outpouring of support from our community,” Lt. Mark Donaldson, a Vacaville Police Departmentspokesman, said in an interview on Tuesday.

The wildfire, which was called the Nelson Fire, scorched nearly 2,200 acres before firefighters could fully contain it Sunday morning. At the end, it stopped about 50 feet away from the shelter’s property.

The shelter lost power and water and was damaged by smoke, but all 60 of the animals found temporary foster homes. By the time the shelter had reopened Sunday afternoon, Donaldson said, some of them had been adopted permanently.