A CBS News reporter and producer safely recovered three dogs from a burning Los Angeles home and returned the pets to their grateful owner after the “dramatic” rescue mission.
When the ongoing L.A. wildfires started to spread on Tuesday, Jan 7, L.A. residents Andrea Pasinetti and his wife Sixuan were out of town, Andrea in San Francisco and Sixuan overseas. A dogsitter was looking after the couple’s three dogs, Alma, Archie, and Hugo, who stayed behind at their owners’ home in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of the city. As the Palisades Fire intensified, Andrea and Sixuan received word from their dogsitter that she couldn’t reach the house because of the blaze.
“At that point, I just ran straight to the airport and flew back to Los Angeles,” Andrea told CBS News. “The flight into [Los Angeles] was definitely very, very hard because we just didn’t have any information.”
CBS News reported that a friend picked up Andrea at the airport. The friend had already acquired a car full of materials needed to rescue the trapped dogs: fire retardant supplies and blankets for the pups. But as they sped towards Andreea’s fire-stricken neighborhood, they soon realized it would be impossible to reach his home because of the fires and numerous blocked interactions.
ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty
“It’s this feeling of helplessness and devastation and also just the unknown,” Andrea told the outlet. “Wanting to maintain hope, but also kind of bracing for the worst.”
Andrea phoned his wife, and the couple started trying to figure out how to rescue their pups from the devastation. During this conversation, Sixuan saw CBS News’ Jonathan Vigliotti reporting from Palisades Charter High School, only minutes from the couple’s residence.
“We started wracking our brains to see if we knew anyone who might be able to get in touch with Jonathan,” Andrea described to CBS News, adding that they tagged the anchor in social media posts but eventually got in contact through a colleague of Vigliotti’s.
When news of Andrea and Sixuan’s trapped dogs reached Vigliotti, along with CBS News producer Christian Duran, who was also on the scene, the house was “on its last legs,” said Andrea. “We knew it was a tall order to extract all three dogs from the house.”
For one, the house was locked, but Andrea told the impromptu rescue team to “break whatever window he could” to get inside. He also gave his best guess at where the pups — who are rescue dogs “pre-wired with a lot of anxiety” — might be hiding in the home as the fire inched closer.
Hans Gutknecht/MediaNews Group/ Los Angeles Daily News via Getty
“The circumstance probably couldn’t have been any more dramatic,” said Andrea. “The house was surrounded by flames.”
But against the odds, Andrea said Vigliotti and Duran made their way into the house — likely needing to lift a bed to retrieve an anxious Hugo from the scene.
Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE’s free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.
“Jonathan called and said, ‘We have the dogs,'” remembered Andrea. “And my first reaction was, ‘All three?’ I have never felt that mixture of joy, and relief, and exhaustion, and despair, and gratitude towards someone.”
He continued: “Three dogs who were probably, you know, scared out of their wits and confronted with folks they’d never seen. And they navigated the situation incredibly deftly and bravely. The generosity, and kindness, and risk they put themselves through to get the dogs was really — I don’t know, I think it’s the best humanity has to offer.”
The Pasinettis’ pups are safe, but the family is still reeling from the devastation, especially after their home burned to the ground hours after their dogs were rescued. The decimated building is one of the thousands of structures lost in the fires that have burned over 30,000 acres and killed at least 25 individuals.
“I think we go through life accruing so much stuff and curating our belongings, but at the end of the day, it’s all stuff — and while it’s sad to lose, I think the possibility and prospect of losing something much more important, just put it into perspective,” Andrea told CBS News. “I think all the plaudits and all the commentary on the firefighters and the first responders really, really is very much deserved, and they put themselves in harm’s way to try to save what they could.”
This post was originally published on this site be sure to check out more of their content.
