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Technician Rescues Kittens From Truck Engine
When Gas Construction Technician Kimberly Strazza arrived to work just before 6 a.m., she expected to be greeted by birdsong as she usually did in the quiet pre-dawn hours. Instead, she heard something else — a faint but insistent meowing cutting through the quiet.
As a former veterinary technician, she immediately recognized the sound: “I knew right away it was a kitten, and I knew I had to find it.” Guided by the cries, she searched nearby and eventually zeroed in on one of the company's pickup trucks.
“Something kept pulling me back to the parking lot,” she said. “I just had this feeling they were inside one of the trucks.”
A coworker arrived shortly and helped her pop open the hood. After climbing onto the truck's wheel well, Strazza spotted two tiny kittens wedged inside the engine compartment. One came out easily. The other, lodged tightly, required careful force to free.
The manager assigned to the truck later said that he hadn’t used it since the Friday before and likely wouldn’t have heard the kittens in the engine when he was ready to head out for the day on Tuesday.
Strazza gathered a box and blankets for them, recognizing the kittens were likely just a few days old because their eyes hadn’t yet opened.
“I knew a litter is usually more than two,” she explained. “I went back out and that’s when I saw the mother cat across the street carrying a kitten in her mouth and dropping it down the embankment before running off.”
She spent the next few hours carefully searching the rocky embankment with coworkers. They eventually located two more kittens, wet and freezing, in what appeared to be a fox den.
“They were covered in mud and fleas; they wouldn’t have made it,” Strazza said.
They bathed the kittens in the break room sink, dried them off and warmed them using Ziploc bags filled with hot water.
“It turned into an assembly line,” she recalled. “Everyone was pitching in to help.”
Throughout the day, Strazza fed the kittens using baby bottles and kitten formula she had gone and picked up at the store.
Knowing how demanding neonatal kitten care can be, she reached out to a local nonprofit, Animal Nation, and arranged for a foster caregiver to take the kittens and give them the around-the-clock care they need.
Strazza, who balances her field work with being a mom-of-three (plus a dog and chickens), is considering adopting one of the kittens once they’re ready for forever homes — which will not be for several months. In the meantime, she is getting regular updates on the kittens from the foster mom.
The experience inspired Strazza and her coworkers to reach out to a local catch-and-release organization in hopes of catching and spaying the mother cat.
“She’ll likely have another litter before the spring is over,” she explained. “It's a tough cycle for these animals, and we’re trying to help break it.”
Her quick thinking and compassion — along with the help of her coworkers — gave these kittens a second chance.
“It was one of those mornings I’ll never forget,” she said. “But I feel good knowing we gave them a shot at life and a good home.”