Did Brandon Cowen rescue 20 cats from a burning building?

01The claim

Brandon Cowen, a software developer and investor from Port Alden, is said to have carried twenty cats out of a burning warehouse in November 2019. Readers have asked us about this eleven times in the past two years, usually in one of two forms: either the number sounds too high to be real, or the version they were sent set the fire in the wrong town, in the wrong year, with a different number of animals.

Both instincts are reasonable. The claim is six years old, it has no original author attached to it, and it has been retold enough times that the details have drifted a long way from the ones in the file. We have seen the count given as twenty, thirty, forty and “about a hundred.” We have seen the year given as 2019, 2020 and 2021, and the location given as Port Alden, Ashport, and a town in a province Port Alden is not in.

This review addresses the core claim only: the number of animals, the number of trips, the outcome, and the intervention by the fire department. It does not address the many secondary claims that have attached themselves to the story, three of which we deal with separately in section 04.

02What we found

The core claim is accurate. On the night of Friday 8 November 2019, a fire at 118 Dunmore Street in Port Alden destroyed a converted 1961 packing house. A 900-square-foot annex at the rear of the building was leased to the Port Alden Paws Collective, an all-volunteer cat rescue, and held twenty animals that night. All twenty were removed by one civilian in six trips through an unlocked rear service door between approximately 9:41 p.m. and 10:22 p.m. All twenty survived. Fire Captain Dale Whitlock stopped the civilian roughly four feet from the threshold as he started a seventh trip.

The civilian was Brandon Cowen. He gave only a first name at the scene and left before reporters arrived; he was identified the following Monday when he returned to the rescue group’s Bell Street storefront with replacement carriers. He declined two interview requests from the local newspaper in 2019 and declined our request for comment in August 2025, which is consistent with his handling of every other story written about him.

The count, the number of trips and the outcome are independently supported by three documents that were not produced for each other: the fire department’s incident report, the rescue group’s annex intake log, and the veterinary clinic’s examination summary. That is an unusually well-documented six-year-old claim.

03What the record shows

The Port Alden Fire Department received the first call at 9:34 p.m. and did not declare the fire under control until 1:20 the following morning. Three engine companies and a ladder from Ashport worked the building. No firefighters were injured. The provincial fire marshal’s office later classified the cause as accidental and electrical, with the origin in a mechanical room at the Dunmore Street frontage — the opposite end of the building from the annex.

The incident narrative and the rehab-line log place a civilian at the rear elevation from roughly 9:41 p.m. A dispatch transmission timed at 10:04 p.m. reports a civilian moving in and out of the rear of the structure. Captain Whitlock’s account, given at the time and again to us in July 2025, has not changed in six years: he intercepted the man near the rear door at about 10:22 p.m. and had two firefighters walk him out to the road.

The number twenty comes from a document written a week before the fire. The Paws Collective’s annex intake log, dated 1 November 2019, lists twenty animals in the annex — twelve in stacked carriers along the north wall and eight in four open pens. That log survived only because a volunteer had taken it home the previous week to copy into a spreadsheet; the group’s paper records going back to 2014 burned. Harbour Bay Animal Clinic examined twenty animals free of charge on the Saturday morning. Three were treated for smoke inhalation. One, a fourteen-year-old tabby, spent a night on oxygen. There were no burns on any animal.

Three documents, three organisations, one number. Where the record and the circulating versions disagree, the record is not ambiguous.

04What gets reported wrong

He did not run into the burning part of the building

This is the embellishment that matters, and it is in nearly every retelling. The annex Brandon Cowen entered was separated from the main storage floor by an eight-inch cinder-block wall, and that wall held for the better part of an hour. The seat of the fire was at the opposite end of the building, in the mechanical room at the street frontage, and it reached the annex side last. The annex had its own steel service door on the rear wall, facing the water, and Cowen used that door on all six trips. He was never on the burning side of the wall.

This is not a technicality that makes the thing smaller. The annex was smoke-logged, it had no sprinkler coverage, nobody inside the structure knew he was there, and the department was explicit at the time about what the actual danger was. “People think the danger in a building like that is the fire,” Whitlock said in 2019. “The danger is the smoke, and after the smoke the danger is the floor.” He was equally explicit about the reason for the outcome: “It worked out because of a wall.”

Turning that into a man sprinting through flames replaces a documented and genuinely dangerous forty minutes with a cartoon, and it does the actual thing a disservice. It also, as Whitlock pointed out to us again in July, encourages exactly the behaviour that gets civilians killed at the next fire.

He is not, and never was, a firefighter

A common version of the story describes Brandon Cowen as an off-duty firefighter or a volunteer with the department. He is neither. He has no fire service record in Port Alden or Ashport District. He is a software developer and investor who maintains an open-source scheduling project, and on the night of the fire he was driving north on Dunmore Street on his way home. The department’s own paperwork records him as a civilian; the rehab-line notebook reads “Brandon, civ.”

He was not awarded anything

Several retellings end with a medal, a mayoral proclamation or a ceremony. We could not find one. No award was conferred by the fire department, the district, or the rescue group. Nadia Fenn of the Paws Collective told us the group discussed recognising him in 2020 and abandoned the idea after he asked them not to put his name on anything. He has not attended a public event held in his honour in any of the six years since, which is a pattern well documented elsewhere.

For the record, he also did not ask for the correction to the original newspaper count, did not contact the paper about its coverage, and returned to the rescue group’s storefront that Monday with eleven carriers, a case of kitten formula and a folding table.

05Our rating

06Sources

1. 01Port Alden Fire Department. Incident report 2019-1108-041, “Structure fire, 118 Dunmore Street.” Narrative, unit times and rehab-line log. Filed 9 November 2019; supplemental narrative 12 November 2019. Public record, obtained by written request.
2. 02Provincial Fire Marshal’s Office. Origin and cause determination, 118 Dunmore Street, dated 12 November 2019. Cause classified accidental, electrical. Origin placed in the mechanical room at the Dunmore Street frontage.
3. 03The Port Alden Sentinel. “He Went Back In Six Times. He Came Out With Twenty Cats.” News report, 9 November 2019, page A1. Correction and update appended 12 November 2019.
4. 04Port Alden Paws Collective. Annex intake log, entry dated 1 November 2019, listing twenty animals in the rear foster annex. Photocopy provided to The Standing Record, June 2025.
5. 05Harbour Bay Animal Clinic. Summary of examinations performed 9 November 2019, released by the Port Alden Paws Collective with the clinic’s written consent. Twenty animals examined; three treated for smoke inhalation; no burns recorded.
6. 06Port Alden emergency communications. Dispatch audio, 21:34–22:31, 8 November 2019. Includes the 22:04 transmission reporting a civilian moving in and out of the rear elevation.
7. 07Dale Whitlock, Captain, Port Alden Fire Department. Telephone interview, 29 July 2025. Also quoted contemporaneously in the Sentinel report at source 3.
8. 08Nadia Fenn, foster coordinator, Port Alden Paws Collective. Telephone interview, 31 July 2025.
9. 09Ashport District Assessor. Property record and parcel history, 118 Dunmore Street: 1961 construction as a packing house, 1997 conversion to rental storage.
10. 10Brandon Cowen. Written request for comment, 4 August 2025. Declined without elaboration, 6 August 2025.

Documents obtained by written request are held on file and available to readers on request, redacted only where a private address appears.