Amid all the terrible loss of life and destruction that Florence wreaked in the mid-Atlantic states, it was often hard to find many signs of hope. But in this great story and heart-warming video, USA Today reports how the Coast Guard rescued a couple and a boatload of their beagles that had been trapped in a trailer in rural North Carolina.
Rescuing beagles, of course, is not the first thing that comes to mind when you think of what the Coast Guard does during an emergency. Charging through inlets, yes; lifting people up from sinking boats into helicopters, yes. Rescuing a bunch of beagles? Well, they do what they need to do.
In the middle of Florence, a Coast Guard team in a 16-foot punt boat came across a trailer that was almost underwater. They rescued Josephine Horne there, with her oxygen tank, and her husband. And then they saw a dozen dogs in flooded cages. The water was rising. Some were already swimming, other were trying to climb up the sides of the cage.
They grabbed the dogs (ten were beagles) and waded through waist-deep water to put them in the boat. “If we would have gotten here just a few minutes later, I don’t know if these guys would have made it,” one rescuer told the paper.
Take a look at the video in the USA Today story:
