Calif. Firefighters Snag Cat in Chimney, MacGyver-Style

SAN JOSE, Calif. — As the old saying goes, if your cat climbs a tree and won’t come down, just call the fire department.

But what happens when a cat is stuck in your chimney? A San Jose homeowner found out Friday that all you need is an elite rescue squad to channel its inner Santa Claus and MacGyver.

Kerry Idemoto, 50, first heard the meows late Thursday, and try as he might simply could not get his neighbor’s black feline out of his chimney. So he took the day off work, climbed in through the fireplace, had animal control officers come out and even called chimney sweepers. But no one could reach the pet.

He grew so concerned that he thought about breaking down the bricks around the fireplace.

“I didn’t know if it was in distress or just wanted to get the heck out of there,” Idemoto said.

Fed up, he and his dad, Bob, drove to the fire stations near his house just outside Japantown on North 19th Street. But the firefighters in the first two stations he visited were gone, presumably out tending to human problems.

That is when he lucked out. About 10:45 a.m., he walked into a third fire station, which called over the department’s lone rescue unit from nearby fire station 34. The four firefighters in the rescue squad, as Capt. Mary Gutierrez recalled hours later, were intrigued and didn’t need to save any humans at the time.

Capt. Jeffrey Riley and his crew, Paulo Brito, Paul Gonzalez and John Pavloff, drove in two trucks to the man’s home, but like the rest of the would-be rescuers before them, realized it was impossible to get the cat out through the fireplace.

“Our guys realized we had to get it from the top side,” Gutierrez said.

The four-man crew took their highly-specialized rescue camera usually used to navigate through crumbled buildings to the roof and slowly lowered it down the chimney. With firefighters viewing on a monitor back on the roof, the camera spotted the cat. It was cowering, weak and stuck inside a pocket in the chimney but fortunately, it still had its collar.

The firefighters took a long pole normally used to break ceilings during fires, and duct-taped one of Idemoto’s metal clothes hangers and a flashlight to the end of it.

Very carefully, they lowered the pole down the chimney about 10 feet, and Voila! they hooked the curved end of the hanger under the cat’s collar and lifted the animal up the chimney, onto the roof.

“It looked like they were fishing. They called it Santa’s cat,” Gutierrez said. “The cat didn’t even fight. It was just so happy, I think, to be pulled out.”

While the cat was dehydrated and weak, it was in decent shape considering it had been stuck in a soot-infested corridor.

“I thought, ‘Well, they’re very innovative,'” laughed Bob Idemoto, 79. “They just took that thing and dropped it in and pulled that cat out.”

The cat was reunited with the couple next door and their daughter, and it turns out their pet had been missing for three days. It was a relief to Kerry Idemoto, who was disturbed after hearing a day before of the brutal drowning of a cat in Redwood City.

“I got the feeling that even though this was a cat,” he said, “the way they approach things (is the same as if) a house was on fire.”