By Paul Gottbrath
Post staff reporter
The tiny gray kitten was running out of lives.
Obviously unwanted and apparently thrown over the side of the Brent Spence Bridge, it landed not in the water of the Ohio River 100 feet below but on the understructure of the span.
It crawled up a series of beams and struts, dragging its hind right leg, which was apparently fractured in the fall. It
reached a 6-by-12-inch plate below a finger joint in the bridge deck -- and could go no further. And there it was stuck, for three or four days, a veterinarian estimated later, its cries for help drowned out by the roar of the thousands of cars and trucks rumbling by 20 feet above it.
That would have been the sad end of a troubling situation if not for a crew of Kentucky and Ohio highway workers trekking the bridge last week for their annual inspection of the span.
Picking their way along a catwalk below the lower deck, Darrell Dudgeon, an engineer specialist for the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, and his cohorts from the Ohio Department of Transportation heard the unmistakable wail of a feline in desperate straits.
"We could hear it, but we couldn't see it -- or reach it," Dudgeon said.
So they went on with their inspection. But when they got back to the deck of the bridge, they agreed a rescue was in order.
The task of actually retrieving the kitten from its precarious perch fell to Dudgeon, 58, of Cropper, Ky., who had rock-climbing gear in his truck -- and experience hanging from high places that would petrify other people.
With other members of the crew stopping traffic above, he lowered himself over the side to a beam about 18 feet below the bridge deck and tied off on it. Flat on his stomach, he then inched his way backward to the kitten's refuge.
"He was perched on this steel plate meowing pitifully," Dudgeon said. "He offered no resistance. I picked him up and put him in a leather bag I had and tied it to my chest harness."
Having solved the kitten's immediate problem, the crew then turned to its more long-range future.
One of the ODOT workers said he would be responsible for getting the cat to a shelter. But that, thought Brian Huber, offered no guarantee that the animal would not be destroyed if it weren't adopted. So Huber, a heavy equipment operator for the Kenton County Department of Highways garage, volunteered to take the kitten home.
First he took it to an emergency veterinary clinic in Alexandria, where its broken leg was treated and it was inoculated. Huber, 30, said a veterinarian at the clinic estimated that the animal had probably been trapped under the bridge for three to four days when it was found, because it was neither defecating nor urinating.
Huber and Dudgeon said they have no doubt how the kitten wound up on a ledge 70 feet above the river. "There's no way it could have walked along the Brent Spence and be where we found it," Huber said. "I'd say it was thrown."
http://www.cincypost.com/2004/10/09/kitten100904.html
Poor baby kitty!
Karma is a bitch!
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