A teenage dog owner is “blown away” after her 8-year-old pooch was miraculously saved from a drainpipe.
Shiva spent 24 hours stuck in the pipe, which was full of water following the severe flooding that had hit Nelson.
Sixteen-year-old Chloe Seller was at her dad’s work in Brightwater playing catch with her dog on Monday, when the tennis ball rolled into a drain.
Seller told RNZ’s Checkpoint that Shiva went diving in after it and in a split second, things turned bad.
“I screamed out saying ‘she’s got stuck in the drain!’
“My dad’s co-worker… ran down there and I followed with her and was like, just kind of trying to get her and hoping that we’d find her.”
But the rapidly moving water made it difficult to reach Shiva, and left little room for her to breathe.
Seller said more and more people from her dad’s work came together to try and find the dog, but were unsuccessful.
“I was hysterical. I was crying. I was everything, like anything you could think of. I was freaking out.”
The longer Shiva was missing, the more the community began to rally together.
“Everyone came together and were looking, including just random strangers from the community were looking for her, which was amazing to know that there’s people out there that will still do that.”
After securing blueprints from Tasman District Council that showed where the drains stretched to, Seller realised Shiva could have travelled between two and four kilometres from where she was sucked in.
“It ends up going out the river and ends up all the way down to Rabbit Island. It goes very far.”
She decided to put a call out on social media for help in the search.
“It blew up. It went nuts. Everyone was like, ‘I hope you find your dog’, just reacting to it, sharing it. There were thousands of views. I posted it everywhere possible. I was trying to find a way that we could get to her, I had phone calls from people, I had just everything.”
As the search reached the 24-hour mark, it was the online call out that brought good news.
“A lovely girl, Shakira and her sisters went out and she goes, ‘Look, we’re finding this dog and we’re not going home until we find her and help her.’ Then I got the phone call saying that they found her.”
Shakira and her sisters discovered Shiva in a manhole, which Seller said she had searched in for more than half an hour.
“She was just poking her nose out and they grabbed her.”
Seller said that while she had no idea how her pet had survived, she still seemed her “happy cheerful self”, making it out virtually unscathed.
“She’s got a little gash on her face, and she had a little bit of blood there. But other than that, she was good.”
Seller said she was “blown away”, calling the whole ordeal “unbelievable”.
Shiva had spent most of her first day back home sleeping.
Seller said while she had told the dog to stay away from tennis balls, she was not sure the message had sunk in, with Shiva going straight for the first ball she saw once back home.
rnz.co.nz
