MANSFIELD — Mansfield fire Capt. Joe Boebel was blunt in his assessment about a cat trapped at the bottom of an old cistern on Monday afternoon.
“There was no way he was getting out of there on his own,” Boebel said.
The fire captain led a crew of firefighters to a property in the 300 block of South Main Street just after 3 p.m.
Boebel and the crew of firefighters — Zach Smith, Matt Wurgler, Wyatt Dupre, Wes Martin and Eli Slater — responded when a resident heard the cat and found it had fallen through a worn, thin covering on top of the cistern, which is only about 16 inches wide at the top.
“It appeared the cat had been down there a few days by the way it was acting. It was down at the bottom, 10 to 12 feet. There was no water in it, but there was mud at the bottom,” Boebel said.
Though narrow at the top, the cistern widened dramatically at the bottom.
“We tried to put a ladder down there to see if would climb up,” he said. “He wouldn’t, but he kept moving around in areas we could see him.”
Smith fashioned a lasso from a rope and lowered it down the cistern, painstakingly working and finally capturing the cat, quickly pulling it back to the stop and to safety.
Was the full-grown cat grateful to its rescuers for saving it from a likely death?
“Once we got it out, it didn’t want to have anything to do with us,” Boebel said with a laugh.
Instead, the cat headed out on its own, running into the company of another feline.
“The property owner was contacted and told to seal the top of that cistern before a kid falls down in there,” the captain said.
