Ketchikan Fire Department firefighters with heroic efforts Sunday brought joy and some relief to the community as it grieves the loss of life and homes caused by the landslide above town on Aug. 25 with the dramatic rescue of two small dogs thought to have been lost a week earlier in the incident.
Four-year old Alani, a small, white maltese/shih tzu, and 8-year old Cassie, a miniature long-haired dachshund, did not make it out when their owners, James and Bill Montiver, escaped the wreckage of their home following the slide event.
James Montiver holds Cassie, and William Montiver holds Alani behind them, members of the Ketchikan Fire Department that helped rescue the dogs on Sunday, Sept. 1, 2024. (KDN Photo by Christopher Mullen)
James Montiver, during a phone call on Monday, talked about their narrow escape and their despair that followed when their beloved dogs were not found.
“A lot of people” in the community were very worried about Alani and Cassie, Montiver said, “and were so excited when they came through and they were found — especially after seven days.”.
He recounted the moments directly after he and Bill Montiver escaped their home. Once they were safe, their concern focused on their small family members.
“We knew that the dogs were still in there from the beginning, and we tried everything we could to get them, but they didn’t respond and they didn’t answer, so we thought the worst, but the first responders wouldn’t let me stay in the house,” James Montiver said. “They were trying to get us out, and it took an hour for them to chainsaw Bill out of there, and they said at that point, they were going to try and go in and see if they could find the dogs.”
He added, “But, it was pretty dark at night and, of course, there was no power there, and they were using flashlights, but they didn’t find them.”
On Friday, the fifth day following the landslide, Montiver said that KFD Chief Rick Hines “went and spent an hour crawling through the house looking for stuff, seeing if he could find anything and (the dogs) never made a sound. He had no idea they were in there.”
On Sunday morning, one week following the slide and the destruction of their home, “a whimper” was heard coming from the Montiver home.
Montiver said, “Everybody freaked out and all the (KFD) crew that was leaving, getting off shift, they all stayed, and all the crew that was coming on — everybody attacked the house going through to see what they could find, and finally one of the girls said, ‘I see an eye! I think I see an eye — it blinked at me!”
KFD firefighter/medic Crystal Schleiff was that crew member who first spotted the dogs.
Schleiff sat down at KFD Station 1 to talk about the rescue of the pups on Monday afternoon.
Schleiff said that she’d been working on a report at the end of her shift when Emergency Operations Center manager and South Tongass Volunteer Fire Department Chief Steve Rydeen came by and told her and fellow firefighter/medic Frank Divelbiss that a whimper had been heard coming from the Montiver home.
“I immediately raised my hand” to volunteer for a search of the home, Schleiff said.
She explained that she had been on shift when the slide first occurred and had been part of the crew that initially had been tasked with finding the dogs a day or two following the slide. At that time, she said, they had been unable to enter the home, as there still was a question concerning the stability of the structure.
“We looked into a window, we looked with our (thermal imaging camera) basically from the exterior — we were in the bucket of the tower (firefighting truck) looking around the house to see if we could see something from the outside,” Schleiff said.
Following that disappointing search, she said she was more than eager to join the search for the dogs following the report of the whimper in the house.
“I wanted to still be a part of that mission,” she said.
According to a Sunday news release from the Ketchikan Gateway Borough, Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities geologist Travis Watkins was the person who heard the whimper as he was working to assess the slide area that morning.
Among those working with Schleiff during that final search for the pups was KFD Captain Divelbiss, KFD firefighter/medic Jason Kynsi, KFD firefighter/medic Tyler Pendergrass and STVFD firefighter/medic Chuck Dodd.
Schleiff said that when they arrived at the scene, they made a plan. Kynsi, as the largest member of the group, was selected to clear debris at the head of the team. Schleiff was selected to follow in Kynsi’s path.
“I’m smaller, I’m agile, I’m lighter, so situations that require that sort of finesse is what we expected to encounter — and we did,” she said.
As Kynsi moved farther into the structure, Schleiff said, she followed, then Pendergrass was third in the entry team.
“We move as a unit still, so even though we have one person farther in, we’re all continuing to move up,” Schleiff said. “The reason for that is, to continue to clear debris — we’re moving it out of the house, we’re not just stacking it in an unstable way.”
Another reason that they work in a line in such a situation is for communication, she said. They use a tactical radio channel to talk to each other rather than the main dispatch channel to avoid interrupting broader communications, but in a line, they also can communicate by speaking to the person behind them, who can pass a request or information down the line to the crew members outside the house if needed.
“It’s kind of like a game of telephone,” she said, where a request for a piece of equipment, for instance, can be passed to the outside crew, then the equipment can be passed up the line to the firefighters at the front.
Schleiff said that such methods are learned formally during classes in Firefighter I training, but they also are practiced by fire department personnel regularly.
Schleiff noted that strength and mobility training has been central to her firefighting career. Although being small in stature sometimes can be an impediment as a firefighter, she said that it is an advantage in confined space responses. She noted that specialty is one area of training she’s interested in certifying for.
“It felt really good to be able to practice that,” she said.
Schleiff has lived in Ketchikan for about five years, she said, and early on she thought she would pursue a career as a nurse. With the idea of earning points on a nursing school application, she began at KFD as a volunteer in February 2022. In May of that year, she started working as a temporary Emergency Medical Technician, then was hired at KFD full time on Sept. 1, 2022.
“Yesterday, having that successful mission was awesome for me, because it happened to be the anniversary of my hire date,” Schleiff said.
Schleiff said that initially she thought she was “too little” to be a firefighter, and her focus, even as a potential nursing student, was on critical and trauma care.
Once she realized that a career was possible as a firefighter/medic, she knew that her love for exercise and training hard was a perfect fit for the job.
Schleiff said that during Sunday’s search for the dogs, they were careful with the use of tools when moving debris out of the way to avoid destabilizing the house. They used a chainsaw to cut some pieces of walls away between studs when necessary.
At one point, Kynsi cut a hole in a wall to allow Schleiff to crawl through, and they found a large tree trunk in the way. They found an alternate path, breaking sheetrock when necessary to move into different areas, allowing Schleiff to slide between the studs as they went.
At one point, they found the opening for a stairway with the banisters still standing, and Schleiff was able to crawl over those to access the floor where they were told the dogs were last seen.
The spaces became so confining as she moved through the structure that Schleiff said she had to request a smaller helmet designed for rock climbing; her firefighting helmet was too big to fit through. The request for the new helmet as well as a request for a saw was sent down the line and the smaller helmet allowed her to safely continue to crawl and shimmy toward their target area. Kynsi used the supplied chainsaw to continue to clear a space for Schleiff.
She said that she continued to shimmy through the narrow spaces to then drop down where a wall had fallen, becoming the floor that she then was moving across.
“That was about three feet of void space, between the ceiling and where that wall had fallen,” she said.
She continued to crawl through the collapsed spaces until she finally was able to access what had been the first floor of the house where they had been told a couch was located on which the dogs were last seen.
She said that as they were working, they would stop, call for the dogs and then listen. They were able to hear a bit of muffled whimpering, which helped to know the area they needed to search, and added to the information about where the dogs were last seen.
“I saw that couch from the wall — from that three-foot void space — and I had the flashlight on on my helmet, and I happened to catch those glints of eyes and I was like, “I see eyes! They’re blinking at me!’ and I got really high-pitched and excited,” Schleiff said.
She sent the message down the line of firefighters that she could see a pair of eyes in the couch area.
She edged closer in order to scoop the dog toward her, and then was surprised to feel small teeth biting her gloved hand. She repositioned herself in the dark, tight space and shined her headlamp into the space.
“I brought my head up and I saw this other little face staring at me and I was like, ‘I found both the dogs!’ So, it was a big moment,” she said.
The dogs “weren’t aggressive, they were quiet, they were shaking, they were obviously scared,” Schleiff said.
She realized that she was going to need help to pull both dogs out of the wreckage, so requested a second crew member who was smaller in stature.
STVFD firefighter/medic Chuck Dodd volunteered and moved up the line to join Schleiff.
Schleiff was able to scoop Cassie into her arms, and Dodd eased Alani out.
They then began to scoot out backward, then passed the dogs down the line of rescuers until the pups were safely outside with support personnel.
Schleiff said that following the rescue, “It just felt really, really good to find them and to find them in such good health. I mean, we really didn’t know what kind of condition they would be in, if we were able to find them, but seeing that they were (upon initial observation) uninjured, getting to see that movement — they’re wiggling and they’re shifting — and it’s like, ‘OK, they’re in really good shape,’ and just having our mission complete in the best way that we could possibly imagine, that felt really, really good.
“I’m very, very happy with the outcome. I’m happy the family was reunited — they’re going through hard times with the damage to their house and it just felt good to have the family to be reunited, and bring them happiness,” she added.
Montiver said that Chief Hines called him to share the news that Alani and Cassie had been rescued.
“Everyone was just excited and elated and overjoyed, and it was amazing,” Montiver said.
“By the time we got there, an ambulance was there to take them to the (Island to Island) veterinarian and they took us by ambulance there and all the first responders were there and everybody was cheering and clapping and crying — I mean, it was just — I think it was a good release for everybody,” Montiver said.
He said that over the course of the week when the dogs were missing, he and Bill Montiver had lost hope, and had begun to process the loss of their small family members.
“It had been seven days, with no noise, with Rick having gone through there on Friday with no noise — we were pretty sure that one of two things had happened,” James Montiver said. “Either something had happened to them at the beginning of the accident or they had maybe escaped and somebody found them.”
As time went on though, Montiver said that the hope that they were safe with someone had faded.
“At that point, we sort of said, ‘It’s not looking good, we need to just say our goodbyes and our prayers and let it go at that,’” Montiver recalled.
Montiver said they were told that no water was seen in the house debris, so it is a mystery as to how the two dogs survived in such good shape.
“The vet doesn’t know how they survived, we don’t know how they survived, we’re just thankful and blessed that they did,” he said.
Montiver described Alani and Cassie as “great little kids; they love everybody and they’re really close to each other.”
He added, “they take care of each other. Cassie’s kind of like a bigger brother sort of thing, and they’ve been our kids forever.”
Montiver emphasized, “we are so blessed and thankful for everything (the first responders) have done, the extra they’ve gone into to help us. The entire community has been absolutely amazing and so giving and supporting and we are just blessed and humbled by it all.”
• This story was originally published by the Ketchikan Daily News.
