ANDOVER — Firefighters can now count themselves among a dog's best friends.
The Andover Fire Department will be among the first in the Merrimack Valley to start using oxygen masks that specially fit dogs, as well as cats, rabbits and even ferrets. The masks will help save the lives of animals caught in fires by providing the same, on-site treatment for smoke inhalation that humans receive, fire Chief Michael Mansfield said.
Masks made for humans are not the right size for animals and don't deliver enough oxygen to clear their lungs, Mansfield said. Animals have to wait to get to an animal hospital for the treatment, and often, that's too late.
"The chance of survival is much higher," with the new masks, Mansfield said, adding that people already lose so much in a fire. "It's even more traumatic when they lose pets as well."
The new masks will be helpful to firefighters, who are responding to more calls for service that involve animals, he said. On Friday, firefighters demonstrated how the mask fit perfectly on Boomer, a 7-year-old black Lab who is a bomb-sniffing dog for Michael Stapleton Associates, a New York-based security firm.
The department received the masks for free from the Main Street Animal Hospital in Salem, N.H. The hospital gave out a total of 20 mask kits, each of which contains three different sizes of masks.
The Andover Fire Department received three kits, meaning they can put one kit on engine companies at each of the town's fire stations — Central, Ballardvale and West.
The masks were also given to fire departments in Lawrence, Methuen, Salem, N.H., and Londonderry, N.H. They're made by a New Zealand-based company, McCulloch Medical. Each mask can deliver 1 to 2 liters of oxygen a minute to an animal.
They're all reusable and work the same way a human oxygen mask would — by feeding oxygen through a tube that pumps it to the nose and mouth.
All of the firefighters will be trained to use the masks over the next couple of weeks and they should be ready for use by April 1, Mansfield said.
