About last night....

Last night and the early hours of this morning were scary here at Fox HQ. Unbeknownst to us, our furnace was damaged at some point during the day and carbon monoxide was leaking into and filling the rescue house. Mikayla was in the house and care taker Merri was on the property; at around half past midnight, the detectors in the house began to go off.

Mikayla and Merri diligently went through steps of changing the batteries and thought all was well - false alarm but about 20 minutes later and 5 or so minutes after the last window was closed, the alarms blared again. This time both of us knew that it was real and we needed to firstly call 911 and secondly get all the animals (including reptiles, that’s nearly 20) and ourselves out.

The police responded quickly and we evacuated all those we could, but once they arrived, we were not allowed to re-enter the house and had to leave the remaining animals inside, which was terrifying.

Both Mikayla and Merri suffered some symptoms of mild carbon monoxide poisoning and had to wait on the ambulance and fire service arriving to firstly find out what had caused the problem and secondly to be assessed by ambulance crews, if required.

The fire crew were great and once they arrived, they examined the house and, after being briefed on SaveAFox’s mission and the remaining animals inside, kept us up to date on their conditions regularly.

By the time the ambulance arrived, both Mikayla and Merri were feeling ok and were not seen by ambulance crews or taken to hospital.

At around 3am we were cleared to re-enter the house and to collect the remaining animals. Mikayla, Merri and videographer Seth worked for around an hour, and everyone was safe and located somewhere comfortable over night because we could not remain in the home.

We considered making this a light-hearted ‘Waverly tried to kill us’ post, because we think it was her foxy shenanigans that caused the damage, but upon reflection, if we had not had carbon monoxide detectors, I could be writing a very different post to you today.

If you don’t have a detector, please buy one. If you do have one, please always, always keep it functional. Last night could have ended in tragedy and multiple deaths.