After falling into sewer main, puppy finds new home, happy ending
As she walks through Brackenridge Park, Pipa’s attention is everywhere.
The black and white puppy wants to greet everyone who passes by and constantly stops to sniff all the new smells. She’ll sit, momentarily at least, for treats, taking them gently before asking for more.
She bears little resemblance to the soaked, shivering puppy pulled out of a sewer main in November, rescued by San Antonio Water System workers.
Now almost 4 months old, she’s found a happy ending: She was adopted by SAWS communications director Anne Hayden, who was there the night she was rescued.
Pipa — Spanish for pipe — was one of three puppies that found themselves trapped in a sewer pipe on Brunswick Boulevard,
on the city’s south side. While the other two were able to be removed quickly from a private sewer line, Pipa moved farther into the pipe, eventually reaching the city utility’s sewer mainline.
Hayden got a call about 9:30 p.m., and watched as the SAWS workers used camera equipment to push the dog about 200 feet to a nearby manhole, where a bucket was lowered and used to bring her to the surface.
After she was rescued, she was taken by the city’s Animal Care Services to an emergency veterinarian, then kept overnight in the ACS clinic, where she was nicknamed “Damsel.”
It’s still not clear how the three dogs ended up in the sewer pipe. The other two were returned to their owner, who gave up ownership of Pipa to ACS to ensure she received medical care, agency spokeswoman Lisa Norwood said at the time.
The next morning, she called ACS. The puppy, who was only about 3 weeks old and weighed seven pounds, was too young to adopt, she was told, but she could foster. Hayden knew right away the puppy would be there to stay, she said.
But the name Damsel didn’t quite fit the dog’s demeanor, she said. “I would expect most dogs to be in a total panic,” Hayden said, but that wasn’t the case. The puppy had been calm throughout the rescue. The SAWS employees who rescued her had started calling her Pipa, and that’s the name that stuck.
Pipa had no issues caused by her underground adventure, and ACS covered the costs of initial vaccines and spaying, Hayden said. “They took great care of her,” she said.
A dog DNA test, purchased for Hayden by her daughter, showed Pipa is mostly “supermutt” — but also a mix of several other breeds: pit bull terrier, Great Pyrenees, French bulldog, boxer and golden retriever among them.
Now about 4 months old, Pipa has nearly tripled in weight, and she’s learned to sit and lie down. She’s still working on fetch — specifically, figuring out that she needs to bring back the ball — and she loves Reggie, though the corgi isn’t quite as thrilled with her puppy energy, Hayden said.
“It may have been a bad thing that she ended up in there,” she said. “But it turned out to be a good thing.”