Waukegan firemen face a mountaineering feline

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Cat on a power pole on Ravine Street in Waukegan. | Special to Sun-Times Media

Updated: April 10, 2012 11:56AM

WAUKEGAN — Yes, the Waukegan Fire Department does get calls from time to time about a cat sitting in a tree. And, yes, the situation normally resolves itself.

“If a cat can go up a tree, it can go down a tree,” said Fire Chief Dan Young. “Sometimes you just open up a can of food or put out some milk, and down they come.”

But Thursday afternoon brought with it a different challenge: a cat sitting atop a utility pole on Ravine Avenue, surrounded by a web of live power lines that it apparently had no intention of climbing through.

“We got a call from animal control around noon, (and) they said that this cat was up a pole and had been there for two or three days,” Young said late Thursday. “It was one of these poles where power lines are running out in two or three different directions, (and) I can’t send our personnel up into live wires, and the cat was propped right between these wires.”

Photos taken by witnesses who gathered at the 200 block of Ravine show the mountaineering feline both perched at the very peak of the pole and walking one of its horizontal crossarms. Young said “it was almost comical at times” as the cat jockeyed for space with passing squirrels.

While a call for assistance went out to ComEd, Young said various techniques were tried in an effort to get the cat to work its way down, including shaking a box of dry cat food as enticement. At one point, he added, fire personnel considered but dismissed the idea of using a blast from a fire hose to sweep the cat free, then catching it with a tarp.

A happy ending was supplied around 5 p.m. when a ComEd crew was able to get the cat down — both in one piece, and without producing sparks.