Tammy Wheat takes care of dogs for people in addition to owning five of her own. She may now owe her family's lives to those dogs.
Investigators say a heating device, made especially for animal shelters, sparked a fire in one of the dog houses just before 12:30 Thursday morning on Fox North Road in Hubbard Township. The flames quickly spread to the house.
Wheat says she, her sister and her daughter were all asleep on the second floor of the house, and it wasn't the sound of smoke detectors that woke her up. "The dogs were just panicking. They were barking and carying on, jumping all over us. And when I opened my eyes, I couldn't see anything. It was nothing but smoke, and I grabbed my kid and threw her out the back door and the dogs came out the back."
The entire basement and first floor of the house were filled with smoke when the family woke up. Firefighters were able to rescue several other dogs trapped in the house. They were able to put out the fire before it reached the second floor.
