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At least 30 cats died and 12 were rescued from a house fire in Fort Erie, Ont., the local fire chief said.<\/p>\n
Fire Chief Mark Schmitt with the Fort Erie Fire Department told CBC Hamilton crews attended a rural location on Burger Road near Netherby Road for a structure fire at around 12:45 p.m. on Sunday.<\/p>\n
Schmitt said the fire was “relatively small,” due to staff at the sanctuary reacting quickly. However, the fire started in the basement, where most cats were contained behind a closed door.<\/p>\n
“[The closed door] kept the majority of the smoke within the basement space and 30 cats succumbed to smoke inhalation,” he said. <\/p>\n
The Happy Days Sanctuary, located on Burger Road, posted to their Facebook on Sunday saying a fire caused heavy smoke throughout the sanctuary house and despite immediate response, some of their “precious cats” died.<\/p>\n
“Our entire team is devastated. Every life here matters, and losing any of our animals is unimaginable,” said a post from the sanctuary. The post garnered over 200 likes and dozens of comments from community members offering to help and sending condolences. <\/p>\n
One of the volunteers, while trying to break open windows to let out some cats, sustained minor injuries, said Schmitt.<\/p>\n
Sanctuary fundraising to rebuild<\/p>\n
Another social media post on Tuesday from Happy Days Sanctuary thanked the Niagara community for their support.<\/p>\n
“We are truly in awe of the generosity and compassion shown by our community. Your support has meant everything during this heartbreaking time,” read the post. <\/p>\n
The sanctuary also shared a photo and names of some of the surviving cats, including five-month old Lucky, Chance, Joy and Hope. Those four were among those sent to an animal hospital in Stoney Creek, according to the post. <\/p>\n
Happy Days Sanctuary also launched a GoFundMe. The money from it, it says, will go to repairing the damage to the house.<\/p>\n
According to the GoFundMe, the sanctuary was already at full capacity at the time of the fire. Schmitt said there were other buildings in the property with more animals who are safe.<\/p>\n
CBC reached out to the sanctuary for further comment but didn’t receive a response before publication. <\/p>\n
Schmitt said the damage amount is around $200,000. <\/p>\n
He also said animal control as well as the Provincial Animal Welfare Services were on-site on Sunday, but didn’t believe there was any further concern.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Listen to this article Estimated 3 minutes The audio version of this article is generated by text-to-speech, a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":58131,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[136,138,137],"class_list":{"0":"post-58130","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-erie","8":"tag-erie","9":"tag-erie-headlines","10":"tag-erie-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58130"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58130\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58131"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}