Born Again: A firefighter’s act of goodwill resurrects a beloved family member & breathes new life into the department’s reputation.
Born Again
A firefighter’s act of goodwill resurrects a beloved family pet & breathes new life into the department’s reputation.
By Nick Brunacini
B Shifter Buckslip, June 3, 2025. First appeared in “Staring into the Sun.”
A few days ago, I read that a fire department is going to stock EMS gear for pets on all of its rigs. Imagine carrying four sets of equipment: pediatric, adult, doggy and kitty cat. Five years ago, it was common to hear firefighters bemoan that we should stop diluting our “craft and trade” by taking on other types of services. Now, some departments have added emergency veterinary services to their repertoire—certainly a sign of the end days.
I’ve been involved in incidents where we’ve rescued both humans and animals. The human rescues are merely a sidebar in the story. If someone has photos or video of a saved family pet, the human element may not even be reported. Let’s face it: we love our pets. Outside certain family members and a few friends, I’m more attached to a small mutt my family took in two years ago than I am to the other 6 billion people I share this planet with.
When you combine a pet rescue with a miracle birth, you’ll surely make headlines and be the toast of the town. And if the saved pet is an exotic one from a faraway land, well, you couldn’t ask for much more, and the story will take on a life of its own. I was lucky enough to bear witness to one such occurrence. Like most historic and life-changing events that take place across the plane of human existence, this one happened in an unassuming and modest area of the city.
It was just after 5 a.m., and two engines, a ladder company and a battalion chief had been dispatched to a house fire. The officer on the first-in engine reported heavy smoke showing from the rear of a medium-sized house. They were pulling an attack line for search, rescue and fire control and assumed command of the event. The crew was in the process of flaking their line in the front yard when they encountered a hysterical woman. “Get my babies out! Don’t let my babies die!” she begged.
The incident commander (IC) reported over the tactical radio channel that they had reports of children trapped inside the house. Just like everyone responding to the call, I woke all the way up and turned up the volume on my radio. The first-due ladder company was the second unit to arrive on scene. This unit’s captain was (and continues to be) a very serious individual. He’s a no-nonsense kind of guy. He reported his arrival at the scene and told the IC over the radio that he and his crew were headed to the roof to perform vertical ventilation. The IC told him no, they had the fire knocked down, and there was very little heat in the house. They needed positive-pressure ventilation and assistance completing the search.
Captain Serious parroted this order back to the IC and went to work. I arrived on the scene in my battalion chief (BC) wagon a minute or so behind the ladder company and transferred command. At this point, we had seven highly motivated firefighters inside a medium-sized house searching for dying children. We balanced the incident out to a first alarm in the event there were people in the smoke-filled house. A man stood with the woman in the front yard. He was trying to comfort her. Every time she dropped to her knees, he would pick her up. She would stand and sob for a few seconds, then drop again. He would pick her up once more. In the background, light white smoke pushed out of the house behind the screaming noise of the 10 hp motor on the vent fan. Crews on the interior radioed that they had achieved fire control but hadn’t found anyone inside the house. The second arriving engine company reported that they were staged on a hydrant half a block to the south. I ordered them to make access through the backyard to see if any kids had sought refuge at the rear of the house and then to assist with completing the interior search. We were 3 or 4 minutes into the call when the sun was starting to come up, and I could hear a news helicopter overhead.
The animal was tits up when they found it, but a firefighter went above & beyond the call of duty & gave it mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. This brought the furry little critter back to the here & now.
The third engine had just staged north of the scene when the cell phone in the BC rig rang. It was our department’s public information officer (PIO). The media had heard the radio reports that children were trapped in the burning house, and they wanted the juicy details. My partner gave him the nickel version, took down his number and told him we would call him back in a few minutes with fresh information. Interior crews reported that they just finished the third sweep of the entire house and turned up no victims. The crew we assigned to check the backyard had just opened a side gate directly across from the command post and was shepherding out all forms of animals. There was a Billy goat, sheep, dogs and cages with rabbits and birds. Cats were attacking the cages, trying to get at the birdie and bunny breakfast treats. The front yard was quickly turning into Noah’s Ark.
We reported the fire was under control, declared an “All Clear” on the house and canceled the balance of the first alarm (no victims, no need). I was watching the festivities in the front yard when Captain Serious knocked on my window. He said the fire started in a mattress that had filled the interior with white smoke. There was very little fire damage, but the place had been smoked up pretty good. The only life form they found inside the house was a furry rodent in a cage that the owner referred to as a sugar glider. Captain Serious thought it looked like an attractive rat. The animal was tits up when they found it, but a firefighter went above and beyond the call of duty and gave it mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. This brought the furry little critter back to the here and now. Captain Serious and I looked over to see the crying woman in the front yard clutching her “baby” and showering it with kisses. Before leaving, the captain added, “One other thing, the rat had a couple of rat babies.”
After we radioed that we hadn’t found any dead people in the house, the incident turned into your run-of-the-mill house fire, and media interest dropped way off. I called our PIO to let him know one of our guys had actually revived the owner’s unusual pet.
“No people victims. The only thing the search turned up was the owner’s sugar glider.”
“What the hell is a sugar glider?”
“I’m told that it’s a furry, rat-like animal from Australia.”
“OK, what’s newsworthy about that?”
“When they found it, it was dead, and one of our guys gave it CPR and brought it back to life.”
“Well, that is interesting.”
“That’s not the half of it. After they brought it back to life, it gave birth to a couple of sugar-glider babies.”
“Liar.”
“I heard it straight from Captain Serious on Ladder 24.”
“Let me talk to him.”
I waved Captain Serious over and told him what I told our PIO. He confirmed the basic details of the story.
“When we found the cage, I only saw the one big, hairy, dead rat in it. After my guy blew in its mouth a couple of times, it came around. Later on, when I saw the cage, there were a couple of babies suckling the mama rat.” Captain Serious handed the phone back to me and disappeared in the front yard zoo. I went back to talking to the PIO.
“Unbelievable isn’t it?”
“I have a bad feeling about this one, but it’s just too good not to share.”
One of the 6 a.m. newscasts had a 30-second blip about our house fire. Video shot from the news helicopter showed the petting zoo in the front yard—the main focus of the story. This was before our PIO put out a media alert describing the biblical event in a humble, everyman and folksy style. Twelve hours later, the sugar glider incident was the lead story on all of the local news channels. The following morning, it made the front page of the newspaper. A day later, the morning disk jockeys at the most popular country music station in the world wrote a song about the blessed event. The national wire services picked up the story. People living in remote parts of the planet were now privy to our little house fire.
One firefighter had the compassion to blow some air into someone’s dead pet. It didn’t take a minute or cost a dime. The pet’s owner only cared about her “baby” when we pulled up to her burning house.
The next day, I was back at work, and first thing in the morning, I received a frantic phone call from Captain Serious. The media had learned his crew was responsible for saving momma rat and her rat babies. He told me he had to take his phone off the hook yesterday after the tenth media inquiry. The two of us formulated a plan where he and his crew could talk to the media one time and be done with it. Our PIO set up a live video shoot for the midday newscast. They would do it in front of the fire station that housed Captain Serious and his famous sugar-glider champions. When I drove by the station at 11:45, it looked like the O.J. trial. We couldn’t find a place to park, so we went back to our quarters and watched it on TV. Mr. PIO started things off and then introduced the ladder crew. I had the unnerving feeling that all of the members of the now-famous ladder crew were glaring at me through the TV. They confirmed they had, in fact, administered CPR to Mama Sugar and saved her life, but none of them had actually seen her deliver the two live sugar pups. The media didn’t care; they had a miracle on their hands. This story was bigger than a vision of Christ appearing in a flour tortilla.
Things took a different turn that evening. A reporter for one of the TV news channels did something completely out of character for a news reporter—she actually investigated the story. She tracked down the homeowner and interviewed her on camera. The homeowner (sugar glider’s master) was very grateful and full of praise for the firefighters who saved her baby. She went on to describe what a sugar glider is, along with a bunch of details generally reserved for the Discovery Channel. When asked about the miracle birth, the woman let the sugar glider out of the bag. She told the world that this was a big misunderstanding.
Mama sugar glider had the babies the day before the fire, and they had spent the night in another cage. After the firefighters saved the mama, the homeowner had put her back into the same cage with her babies. She could understand why the firemen mistakenly assumed the wondrous birth. The reporter was very good-natured about it and ended her story with a giggle. Some of the other news channels did not want to believe her. Many of them seemed angry that someone would let “facts” interfere with such an amazing and joyous story. Things were starting to heat up when another fire-related story knocked the sugar-glider event out of the news. A serial arsonist had struck again. This was an ongoing news event containing elements of eco-terrorism, fire, the FBI, ATF, arson-sniffing dogs (always a big part of the story) and local firefighters. The arsonist had already torched four or five high-end houses under construction near the edges of mountain preserves. One story said this misguided individual felt he was protecting our open spaces. Several months later, after he was captured, it turned out that his house bordered the same mountain preserve. Another selfish, criminal moron.
During the course of sugar-glider week, the Phoenix Fire Department went on more than 3,000 calls. We delivered babies, treated and transported ill diabetics, put out structure fires, rescued trapped hikers on mountains, and saved heart attack victims, along with all of the other routine stuff we do during an average span of seven days, just like thousands of other fire departments. The sugar-glider story overshadowed all of it until the continuing acts of an infamous and anonymous psychopath knocked it out of the spotlight. One firefighter had the compassion to blow some air into someone’s dead pet. It didn’t take a minute or cost a dime. The pet’s owner only cared about her “baby” when we pulled up to her burning house. Captain Serious and his crew were able to give her the only thing she wanted during that frantic time in her life. The owner got what she wanted, and we got a million dollars worth of goodwill. What else is there?
Nick Brunacini joined the Phoenix Fire Department (PFD) in 1980. He served seven years as a firefighter on different engine companies before being promoted to captain and working nine years on a ladder company. Nick served as a battalion chief for five years before promoting to shift commander in 2001. He then spent the next five years developing and teaching the Blue Card curriculum at the PFD’s Command Training Center. His last assignment with the PFD was South Shift commander. Nick retired from the PFD in 2009 after spending the first 26 years of his fire-department career as a B-shifter and the last three on C Shift. Nick is the author of “B-Shifter—A Firefighter’s Memoir.” He also co-wrote “Command Safety.” Today, he is the publisher of B Shifter and a Blue Card instructor.