Londoners thanked for helping rescue horses, dogs, from truck fire on Veterans Memorial Parkway

A Port Perry woman is thanking all the strangers who stopped alongside a London, Ont., road on Sunday to help save her dogs and horses from a burning truck.

Karin Davis was travelling along Veterans Memorial Parkway with three dogs in her truck, and two horses in tow, when she first caught the smell of smoke.

“I got to the lights on Admiral, and I realized the smoke was coming from underneath my hood,” she explained.

Fearful that her vehicle was going to catch fire and explode, Davis pulled her truck and trailer off to the side of the northbound lanes and started getting her dogs out of the car.

“There was traffic everywhere,” she said. “There’s not much room on the side of the road.”

But people pulled over to help.

While some held her dogs, others began stopping the flow of traffic whizzing by as she rescued a Fresian stallion named Moris, and a young Hanoverian named Rhys, from the trailer.

“I just knew I was going to lose the truck,” she said. “I couldn’t lose the horses.”

Once the animals were unloaded, Davis raced back to the truck to grab her wallet with her ID. By that point, she said flames were licking up the windshield.

Eventually, the truck was fully engulfed in flames.

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“We lost everything that was in it,” she said. But most importantly, all the animals and people escaped unhurt.

Davis said the London police officers and the firefighters who attended the scene were “great.” And so were the peope who stopped to help.

“I had people who didn’t know anything about horses holding them. I had people running over to Tim Hortons getting cups and filling them with water. Watching the young guy, the young horse, drink water out of a Tim Hortons cup was pretty good.”

“A big, big thank you to all of you. They didn’t know me. They all stopped, they all helped, they did what they could. It was fantastic.”

A friend with a barn in Lambeth drove Davis and her animals to her property.

“We’re safely home, all unscathed. And I thought, how am I going to get the point across to everybody, just what they did to help me?”

“Because without them, we wouldn’t have got through.”