Dog rescued from drain after 12 hours

FRANKTON, Ind. (Herald Bulletin) - Tramp was resting comfortably, exhausted but safe, late Saturday after surviving 12 hours wedged in an underground drainage culvert, according to our newsgathering partners at the Herald Bulletin.

Gordon Mott and Tramp, a 4-year-old Treeing Walker, were hunting raccoons Friday night on farmland in the area of county roads 500 West and 400 North, when the dog apparently followed her prey into the 10-inch culvert, Mott said.

“She loves to hunt, and she loves to run those coons,” he said.

Although trained not to venture into trees, holes in the ground, or culverts, “She must have actually been close enough to see it go in and just kept going herself,” Mott said.

Fortunately, Mott was able to track his hunting companion using a global positioning system device, but she had crawled 100 to 130 feet into the pipe before getting hopelessly stuck.

“She was in there so tight she couldn’t even roll over, and the pipe was a quarter full of mud,” he said.

Mott said he tried to shovel the dog out, working through rain and thunderstorms to free her, but he finally abandoned those attempts before dawn.

Then he called the Frankton Volunteer Fire Department, and Chief Rob Amick’s immediate response was heartening, Mott recalled.

“You meet me there, and we’ll get the dog,” Amick told him.

But it required a lot more resources than Amick’s firefighters could provide, so they called in reinforcements, the Madison County Sheriff’s department with a special camera normally used by the SWAT team, Shawn Watson of Watson Excavating Inc. and Delmolino Plumbing of Anderson.

Watsons cleared a path through woods to get an excavator to the site, then dug carefully around where they figured Tramp was trapped.

“In my 23 in business I’ve never done anything like that. There was a lot more dog stuck in there than I would have thought,” he said. “But it sure was a good feeling to watch that dog come climbing out of that hole.”

It was a very happy ending, Amick agreed.

“Everybody was hugging and high-fiving because it was just so unusual and the outcome was so positive,” Amick said. “This man loves the dog. He trained it, and it was his baby.”

A veterinarian administered fluids for dehydration, as well as antibiotics and anti-inflammatory drugs, but Tramp was otherwise in good health, Mott said.

“It was an awesome rescue,” he added.