SEATTLE — After a fire tore through The Dog Resort Sodo last Monday night, dozens of boarded dogs were suddenly left without shelter. KING 5 has learned that many of those dogs are still not home.
"Today we have 31," said Elise Vincentini, owner and founder of Downtown Dog Lounge.
After the fire was put out inside the business that night, animal welfare advocates helped corral a big group of scared and trembling dogs into its front yard enclosure. Still, their immediate futures remained in flux.
"We were like, 'Where are we going to put the dogs?' And I just said, 'I have a vacant space. Let's take them there,'" said Elise Vincentini.
Vincentini said she saw KING 5's TV news reports and jumped in to help.
"I heard on the news, I was just getting ready to go to bed, that there was a fire in Sodo,” she said. Vincentini has owned a competing dog boarding business in Seattle for the last two decades called Downtown Dog Lounge.
"I would hate to get a call and go, ‘Where's my dog?' And, you know, not know that," said Vincentini.
So the dog lover headed straight to SODO, where she had volunteers help her to transport the dozens of dogs to her facility. Eight days later, many of them are still downtown, under her care.
"I think it was like 43 the first night," she said, adding that currently, they "have 31 in-house."
She said many dogs were disheveled and appeared traumatized the first night but are doing much better now.
"There were a couple of dogs that, just their hair got burned," she added. Four of them, she said, had to go to the veterinary emergency room to be checked out.
Vincentini and her staff were able to work with Seattle Dog Resort’s staff to get in touch with the dogs’ owners and alert them of their dog’s new whereabouts. However, many of the fire survivors’ owners are out of town, causing delays in the pick-up process.
It's worth noting that her business, Downtown Dog Lounge, is not in any way affiliated with Seattle Dog Resort or its owner.
“I know she considers us as competitors,” said Vincentini.
For background, she explained that her Elliott Way facility had been vacant because the pandemic slowed business down. For this reason, she closed the facility to cut costs and focus on her other locations.
But with the reopening of the Elliott Way location and the sudden addition of several dogs from the fire, she needed help. She said she hired a couple more employees to meet the need.
And, she said, “We pulled some people from those stores,” she said, regarding her other locations.
They were already stretched thin with the holiday rush, however.
“It’s our second busiest week of the year,” she said. “So it's super busy.”
Nonetheless, she said they are making it work.
“I’d hope someone would do that for us if, you know, that would have happened to us,” said Vincentini.
She said 28 of the remaining dogs are slated to be picked up by the end of Thanksgiving weekend and that the remaining three will be taken to another one of the Downtown Dog Lounge locations.
The owner of Seattle Dog Resort, where the fire was, is still unable to be reached for comment.
One of the dog owners had gone on a trip overseas, so she boarded her two dogs. She never expected to get a call from the Washington State Department of Transportation giving her news about her dog Georgie, who was killed when he ran from the fire and ended up on Interstate 5.
According to a Facebook post from the dog's owner, another dog that went missing after the fire was found days later and is receiving emergency care.
In February, there was a fire at The Dog Resort, owned by the same company, in Lake City. More than 100 dogs were in danger when a faulty drier sparked the fire. All the dogs were recovered, and all of them survived during that incident.