Evanston Fire Department crews had just rescued a dog in distress from the icy Dog Beach Jan. 25. The firefighters had started packing up their equipment when they got the word.
Another dog down.
“A guy comes up to us and says, ‘Hey, there’s a dog in the water,’” Capt. Ryan Roeder told The Daily.
“Sir, we know,” Roeder remembers responding. But then the man continued.
A second dog had slipped into the water, he told Roeder. In the exact same spot.
So dog rescue No. 2 began.
The second dog met the same fate as the first: safe and sound. With the potential canine catastrophe averted, the city closed the Dog Beach that same day, citing “serious safety concerns.”
On Sunday, with the ice mostly melted, the city announced it reopened the beach, located at 1811 Sheridan Road. Some Evanston dog owners reacted with jubilation after the weeklong closure. Yet the memory of that near-fateful day runs deep.

Shift Chief Tim Migon arrived first on the scene. The fire department had just heard that a dog fell off an ice shelf and couldn’t get out of the water. A crowd had gathered, he said.
“I drove out to the south end of the Dog Beach,” Migon said. “And there I could see a lady leaning over the ice shelf and a bunch of people calling for help.”
He directed “all incoming companies” toward the south end, he added.
They responded swiftly. Some firefighters hopped the Dog Beach fence, Roeder said. One truck company cut through the barrier.
The drenched dog appeared to have climbed onto an ice shelf. A woman on her stomach held onto the leash, Roeder added. The dog needed a lift.
Roeder dropped a 14-foot ladder in the water. That helped the crew assess its depth, about 6 feet, he said. A firefighter wearing a yellow Mustang Survival drysuit climbed on the ladder.
“He was close enough to then grab the dog and hand it up to the other firemen that were waiting right on the ice shelf,” Roeder said. “That was dog No. 1.”
“Dog was in good condition, happy,” Migon added. “The owners were ecstatic. People were cheering all around.”
The crews returned to their trucks. The Mustang suits came off. They packed up.
Meanwhile, Evanston resident Lisa Lauren headed toward the Dog Beach with her two terrier mixes: 5-year-old Rufus and 7-year-old Shirley. She’d seen fellow Dog Beach devotees post online about the winter scenes there.

As she approached the gate, she ran into a woman who “seemed very agitated” and said her dog fell in the water. Lauren said she kept going.
“When I pulled up and parked, I had seen the fire trucks and police all parked at the south end of the beach,” Lauren said. “And I didn’t know what that was, and I didn’t know that it had anything to do with her dog, because she didn’t say that.”
She let her dogs off-leash, and just like usual, they headed toward the south end of the fenced-in beach, Lauren added.
A narrow opening between two chunks of ice appeared, she said.
“Shirley, she is a natural explorer,” Lauren said. “She went over there and just quickly slid right into the water, on the ice.”
The fire crew headed back to the same ice shelf. This time the rescue proved simpler. One member reached down and grabbed Shirley by her harness, Migon said.
Rufus paced around. Yet those few minutes were terror for Shirley’s owner.
“To me, it looked terrifying,” she said. “It looked like the scene from the Titanic when I looked down that narrow slide between these two icebergs — what looked like icebergs at the end of the beach.”
Though wet, Shirley seemed fine, Lauren said. And it wasn’t the dog’s first tough moment.
Lauren’s family is Shirley’s third owner. Previous owners had complained that she’d run away too often, Lauren said.
“She’s a little trooper,” she added.
A few people milled about the reopened Dog Beach as their dogs frolicked on the sand Monday. Northwestern Performance Studies Prof. Mary Zimmerman brought her dog, Lottie, and said she was “thrilled” hearing about the reopening.
She had gone to the beach on that fateful Saturday before the dogs fell.
“It was just so hard and slippery at the top of the ledges, and I just was too nervous,” Zimmerman said. “So I actually left.”
Lauren said she doesn’t blame anyone but herself for the accident.
And she won’t return to the beach until everything has melted.
“I feel kind of bad that I had an unfortunate experience there,” Lauren said. “But I’m also relieved that it ended up having a positive outcome. Thank God that lady called the fire department, and they just happened to be there.”
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