35 extremely touching images of 53 rescue dogs that survived a plane crash
A turboprop plane crash-landed on a golf course in Pewaukee, Wis., while transporting 53 rescue dogs from New Orleans on Tuesday. (Courtesy of Humane Animal Welfare Society)
Tony Wasielewski pulled crate after crate from the wreckage of a plane that was supposed to carry 53 rescue dogs from New Orleans to Waukesha, Wis., on Tuesday morning. Instead, it crash-landed on a snow-covered golf course just outside of Milwaukee.
As the deputy fire chief went to grab yet another crate, one of the rescues—roaming the fuselage after freeing herself during the crash—leaped into his arms and showered him with kisses.
Wasielewski, 47, didn’t know it yet, but less than 48 hours after leaving the crash site, he would welcome that dog into his family.
It all started around 9 a.m. Tuesday when several employees at the Western Lakes Golf Club in Pewaukee, Wis., watched a twin-engine turboprop airplane crash onto the green of the fifth hole, Jason Hoelz, the club’s general manager, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. The plane then shot through some trees—snapping off the wings—before plowing through a marsh, skidding across the second-hole fairway, and ramming into a tree on hole No. 3, where it came to rest.
“This was a relatively catastrophic landing,” Matthew Haerter, assistant chief at Lake Country fire and rescue, said Tuesday at a news conference, just hours after it happened.
Everyone and every dog aboard the plane survived, although all three of the people and some of the pups suffered minor injuries. About 300 gallons of jet fuel spilled onto the golf course and into a marsh, triggering cleanup efforts from the state Department of Natural Resources, Haerter said.
It’s unclear what caused the crash. The Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board are investigating.
Golf course employees rushed to the wreckage, pulling out the pilot, co-pilot, and another person from the plane before offloading the dog crates. When firefighters arrived, the employees used golf carts to ferry them to the crash site.
Maggie Tate-Techtmann, a director for the Humane Animal Welfare Society, told The Washington Post that Tuesday’s flight was one of HAWS’s regularly planned trips shepherding at-risk adoptable dogs from southern states to shelters in the Waukesha region. Tate-Techtmann said they usually organize two such trips a month, although most are done by van.
On Tuesday morning, HAWS had assembled a large team of employees and volunteers at the Waukesha County Airport to welcome the incoming dogs discombobulated by a roughly 1,000-mile trip. Learning about the crash, they scrambled to the golf course, about six miles away. Once there, staff veterinarians examined all of the dogs and relayed 21 of them to HAWS and the rest to other shelters in the area, as had been the plan.
“It is a lot of just comforting them and caring for them,” Tate-Techtmann said at Tuesday’s news conference. “Every animal is different just like we are, so we’re all going to react a little bit differently.”
Within hours of the crash, HAWS employees started a campaign to raise money to “help cover the unforeseen medical and other costs that resulted from the incident.” By Thursday afternoon, they’d raised more than $6,500, surpassing their goal of $5,000.
On Wednesday, the shelter started adopting out seven of the 53 dogs “that we’re now affectionately calling the Western Lakes Loves.” By the end of Thursday, they had upped that number to 19, Tate-Techtmann