Puppy suffers burns in fire at Bellingham homeless encampment Wednesday
A fourth-month-old, male, black Labrador retriever-mix puppy suffered burns to its legs during a fire Wednesday afternoon at a homeless encampment in Bellingham.
The Bellingham Fire Department was called at 1:03 p.m. Oct. 20 to the 4100 block of Northwest Avenue for a smoke investigation, according to the PulsePoint app.
“As they were responding to the area, crews saw a large amount of black smoke coming from the area, so they upgraded it to a structure fire response” fire department spokesperson Dustin Michaelis told The Bellingham Herald. “They arrived and found a homeless encampment in the area behind Jack in the Box fully involved.”
Nobody was found at the encampment to speak about what may have caused the fire, Michaelis reported.
But firefighters found the puppy that had burns to its limbs, Michaels said. The puppy was transferred to the Whatcom Humane Society for care and is being fostered by their staff.
“We’ll know more about his injuries tomorrow, but it looked like he just had a few burns,” Michaelis said. “The Humane Society bandaged him up pretty good.”
According to a Facebook post by the department, the puppy has been named “Marshal.”
“Our crew went above and beyond and now we may need to change our motto to ‘Helping People AND Puppies Every Day,’” the post read.
Nobody else was injured in the fire, which forced the closure of Aldridge Road for approximately 45 minutes so that firefighters could put the fire out, according to Michaelis.
