Animal emergencies may get special code

Special to the Vindicator

Photo

Lonnie Kolat sits with Diesel, his male laborador retriever, who is recovering at the Kolat home from hypothermia. Diesel and Kolat’s female laborador retriever, Savannah, both 5 years old, fell into an opening in a neighbor’s pond Jan. 25, and Savannah drowned. At the request of the Brookfield Township police and fire chiefs, the director of the Trumbull County 911 dispatch center is conducting an investigation into why dispatchers didn’t ask the Brookfield Fire Department to respond to the pond after a caller alerted dispatchers to the problem.

By Ed Runyan

runyan@vindy.com

WARREN

Trumbull County’s 911 director says he will be asking county police and fire chiefs organizations if they agree that a new code should be used to alert authorities to a serious animal complaint.

The new code, which would be called “animal emergency,” most likely would have a higher priority than the “animal complaint” code used now.

Ernie Cook, 911 director, said he is proposing the idea in response to an incident Jan. 25 in Brookfield Township, when two dogs fell into the icy waters of a backyard pond.

One of the dogs drowned. The neighbor who owned the pond saved the other dog by putting a ladder over the ice and pulling the animal to safety.

Brookfield police and fire chiefs lodged a complaint after the incident, wanting to know why the Brookfield Fire Department was never notified of the call.

The first responder to the pond was a police officer — 23 minutes after the first call came into the dispatch center.

Cook has said officers were tied up on a domestic-violence call, which carries a higher priority rating (1 compared with an animal complaint, which is priority 5).

Cook and the owner of the dogs, Lonnie Kolat, have said the potentially bigger danger was that Wayne Yurak could have been injured or killed while saving the dog.

Cook said he has not yet made a decision on whether either dispatcher who took two calls from the homeowner will face any disciplinary action.

Cook said Brookfield Township has had 778 animal-complaint calls in the past three years, and all of them went to the Brookfield Police Department first because that is the protocol in place. The police department decides whether the call should be handled by police or fire.

Cook said he thinks there was probably a misunderstanding between a dispatcher and Yurak in that the dispatcher didn’t realize the dogs were in the water. He apparently thought the dogs were on ice, Cook said.