Fort Worth senior living resident searches storm sewer for 3 hours to save neighbor’s dog
The story is almost too fantastical to believe.
A 65-year-old cancer survivor who is recovering from spinal surgery saved her elderly neighbor’s blind and deaf dog from a storm sewer.
The jaw-dropping events happened last week at the Courtyards at River Park Senior Living, when Libby Gilmore heard her 91-year-old neighbor, Pat Kemp, yelling for help outside her window.
Kemp’s 3 1/2 pound shih tzu named Carrie had wandered off and it was getting dark.
Gilmore, who has been pretty much confined to her bed since undergoing multiple back surgeries and breaking her shoulder two months ago, sprung into action.
Before she knew what she was doing, Gilmore was climbing into a storm sewer after a group of male residents pried open a manhole. Gilmore, who stands about 5-foot-1, was the only one small enough to traverse the tunnel, albeit on her stomach.
Gilmore, armed with a flashlight in the pitch black tunnel, said she was lucky because the previous night’s rain had cleared out most of the debris.
But the first tunnel turned up nothing. So the group tried another part of the drainage system, which spills into the Clear Fork Trinity River in southwest Fort Worth. But the next well, about 20 feet deep, only had emergency steel bars to use as a ladder down, the kind utility workers probably know well. But a 65-year-old woman with a bad back? Not so much.
“I thought there was no way we’re going to find this dog,” Gilmore said. “Only an idiot would do this. If I fall, I’m dead.”
Gilmore, however, is a devoted animal lover who has worked with Ninja Paws Rescue, a non-profit animal rescue organization. She wasn’t giving up.
So she headed down the well and took the first tunnel, where she thought Carrie might be.
“I turned a corner, and I could see a little black lump,” she said. “How I got the right tunnel and found the dog is a miracle.”
The job was far from over, though. Gilmore now had to backtrack on her stomach to the 20-foot well while holding on to the little dog. By this time, police officers and firemen from Engine 30 had arrived.
In the back of Gilmore’s mind, she was thinking “It’s my luck I’m going to have a heart attack in here and they’re going to have to drag me (and the dog) out.” She had a quintuple bypass about 10 years ago.
From down below, Gilmore could hear the gathered crowd start celebrating. “She found the dog!”
Carrie, Gilmore said, wasn’t shaking and probably wasn’t aware how lost she was. “She’s just used to someone coming and picking her up,” she said.
“I sat there and cried for moment,” Gilmore said. “God answered my prayers.”
Gilmore still had to climb her way back up the well. She handed the dog to a fireman who offered to carry her back up, but Gilmore was afraid her mending shoulder couldn’t take the stress.
“I crawled out of the hole and just stood there in shock for a minute,” she said. The police and firemen just shook their heads in disbelief.
Neighbor Bob Brennand, 90, who is one of the elder statesman at the living center, couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
“She’s about as big as your leg,” he said of Gilmore. “It was the damnedest thing and I’ve seen things all over the world.”
“You’re out of your cotton-picking gourd,” he told her.
The firemen let Gilmore return Carrie to Kemp, who was sitting in her wheelchair nearby. Kemp burst into tears.
Gilmore credits her senior living neighbors for assisting in the rescue, including opening the manholes, supplying the flashlights and offering her water during the three-hour ordeal.
“I could not have done that by myself,” she said. But Gilmore is one of the youngest residents and about the only one small enough to fit in the tunnels. And the only one crazy enough to do it.
Police told Gilmore there were hundreds of tunnel choices she could have taken down in the well. She got lucky.
Her fellow residents wrote a thank you note late that night that said “we think you’re the craziest, bravest person we’ve ever met.”
Gilmore was resting in bed the next day, “so sore I could barely move any body part.”
“My doctors all say I’m a little crazy,” she said. “I don’t know how I physically did what I did. I do not feel like a hero as anyone small would have done what I did. I’m just glad Pat and Carrie are back together.”
