It was a little more than a year ago that dozens of firefighters were called to Zoar Ridge Stables for an overnight blaze that destroyed the property owners' home.
A year later, Annette Sullivan, who lived at the home with her family, is involved in a rescue of her own and helped to reunite a 15-year-old mare with a 29-year-old North Carolina woman who had thought she would never see her horse again, according to News-Times, which published the dramatic tale of the rescue and reunion on its website Thursday.
Megan Chance had bought Burma's Lady in 1999 and then lost contact with the horse in 2005 after she was unable to get in touch with a woman she had contracted to care for the animal, according to the News-Times article.
During the intervening years, Burma's Lady apparently was used in a testing facility and slated for slaughter before being rescued by Sullivan, who later was able to reunite the animal with Chance, according to the News-Times article titled, Horse saved twice from near death."
The 30-acre stable is located on Morgan Drive in Sandy Hook to where
after an electrical problem in the garage sparked a fire that reduced the main residence to rubble, officials said.
Sullivan, her husband, two children and a family friend who rented an apartment had been inside sleeping at the time, officials and friends said at the time. Sullivan's husband was the one to discover the fire after hearing alarming noises in the garage, and then waking his family, officials said.
By the time arrived, the blaze had engulfed the structure. Horses on the property also were moved to a different location in order to keep them calm and far from the chaos of the fire, . No horses were injured as a result of the fire, though at least one family cat was believed to have perished from the blaze, officials and friends said at the time.
The Sullivans are well-known in town, and many of their neighbors came to their aid following the blaze.
Editor's note: An earlier version of this article referred to a headline from the originally published News-Times story. However, that newspaper subsequently revised its headline and now the revisions have been reflected in this article.
