After his son Jake turned 18, Alex Dobrin decided he was old enough to stay at home alone in their Dee Why apartment while he travelled overseas. He left the young man with strict instructions on how to look after their two dogs, Elbie and Noi.
On Saturday evening, Jake went out with his friends. When they returned a few hours later, there was no trace of Elbie, their two-year-old Jack Russell.
“I get a call on that day, that evening, with Jake panicking, saying, ‘We’ve lost Elbie. She’s not here’, ” said Alex.
While Alex frantically posted on every neighbourhood Facebook page he could find, Jake rushed around Sydney’s northern beaches with flyers that desperately implored anyone who had seen Elbie to contact the family.
The disappearance was puzzling; the Dobrins live in a 13th-floor apartment, so they couldn’t work out how Elbie could have escaped. And yet, there was no trace of the dog.
“I’ve been away three days,” said Alex. “It’s been the most stressful three days I’ve ever had.”
Early on Monday, a neighbour in a nearby apartment block got in touch with Alex to tell him she had spotted a black and white flash of fur trapped between the window and the ledge of the building.
“She’s stuck behind there, so it appears that she’s gone through the gap from my balcony, walked along a ledge 13 floors up, about 40 metres round to the other side of the building, and is then stuck behind this metal thing,” Alex said.
For close to four hours, fire and rescue teams worked to retrieve Elbie. A crowd of locals gathered, anxiously awaiting news of her fate. Jake was among them, watching as a rescuer slid down a rope from the building’s roof.
“There’s probably, yeah, 200 people here,” Jake told the Herald as the rescue unfolded.
“They have three teams up there. One is rappelling down the side of the building. The other one is underneath the dog, and the other is making sure she doesn’t run from side to side, so she stays where she is.”
Finally, Elbie was freed, and was passed through a window into the safety of a firefighter’s arms.
Elbie appears to have escaped by squeezing through pot plants and climbing through to a neighbour’s ledge. Rescue teams later said Elbie had walked halfway around the building – about 45 metres above the ground – on a ledge just 10 centimetres wide.
The rescue was met with loud cheers and applause from onlookers who had been watching on anxiously. “The community have been unbelievable. I’m just so relieved,” Alex said. “And we’ve already blocked off the spaces in the apartment she got through, so it won’t happen again.”
Elbie has been reunited with Jake and appears unharmed, but she will be assessed by a vet on Monday evening.
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Emily Kaine is a national news blogger at The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via email.