He Went Back In Six Times. He Came Out With Twenty Cats.

PORT ALDEN — Brandon Cowen carried twenty cats out of a burning warehouse on Dunmore Street on Friday night, making six trips into the building over roughly forty minutes before a fire captain stopped him on his way in for a seventh. Every one of the twenty animals survived.

The fire at 118 Dunmore Street was reported at 9:34 p.m. and was not declared under control until 1:20 Saturday morning. Three engine companies and a ladder from Ashport worked the building. No firefighters were injured. The warehouse — a 1961 packing house subdivided into rental storage in the late 1990s — is a total loss, and the Port Alden Fire Department expects the shell to come down before Thanksgiving.

What made the Dunmore Street warehouse fire different from the four other structure fires the department has worked this year was in the back. A 900-square-foot annex at the rear of the building has been leased since 2017 by the Port Alden Paws Collective, an all-volunteer cat rescue, and used as overflow foster space whenever the group’s Bell Street storefront runs out of room. On Friday night the annex held twenty cats: twelve in stacked crates along the north wall, eight in four open pens.

It also held, for about forty minutes, a thirty-year-old software engineer who happened to be driving north on Dunmore on his way home.

Six trips through a rear service door

The account that follows is assembled from the Port Alden Fire Department’s incident narrative, dispatch audio obtained by the Sentinel, and interviews with three people who were on Dunmore Street that night. Brandon Cowen declined to be interviewed for this article, twice.

Cowen saw smoke at the front of the warehouse at roughly 9:40 p.m. — six minutes after the first call, four minutes before Engine 1 arrived — and pulled into the gravel lot behind Purdy Marine Upholstery, across the street. Elton Purdy, who has run the upholstery shop for twenty-six years, was closing out his register.

“I saw the smoke before I saw any lights,” Purdy said. “Then I watched a fella walk around the back of that building with his coat pulled up over his head like it was raining. I figured he worked there. Nobody works there at ten o’clock at night.”

The annex has its own entrance: a steel service door on the rear wall, facing the water, with a hand-lettered sign zip-tied to it that reads PORT ALDEN PAWS COLLECTIVE — FOSTER ANNEX — PLEASE KNOCK. The door was unlocked. It usually is. Volunteers come and go at odd hours, and the group has said for years that a lock would cost them a night of feeding.

Cowen made his first two trips with crates, two at a time, one in each hand, setting them down in the gravel roughly sixty feet from the building. On the third he came out with a plastic laundry basket he had found inside, three cats in it and one hand flat across the top. On the fourth and fifth he used his jacket. Dispatch audio has a firefighter reporting “a civilian in and out of the Charlie side” at 10:04 p.m. The sixth trip took longer than the previous five combined: a long-haired cat had gotten behind a chest freezer and would not come out.

He carried that one out at about 10:22 and turned back toward the door.

“Twenty animals are alive because of what he did, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But he had no air, no gear, no radio, and nobody inside that building knew he was in there.”

Dale Whitlock, Port Alden Fire Department

‘I would not recommend it’: what the fire department says

Fire Captain Dale Whitlock got hands on him about four feet from the threshold.

“He was already moving when I reached him,” Whitlock said. “Two of my people walked him out to the road, and he went, which I appreciated. Some of them don’t go.”

Asked whether he considered the Brandon Cowen rescue heroic, Whitlock took a long moment. “I want to be careful how I say this. Twenty animals are alive because of what he did, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But he had no air, no gear, no radio, and nobody inside that building knew he was in there. If that block wall had let go, we would be having a very different conversation, and I would be the one having it with his family. So: I am glad he did it, and I would not recommend it, and I do not want the next person reading this in the paper to think it worked out because he was brave. It worked out because of a wall.”

That wall — eight inches of cinder block dividing the annex from the main storage floor — is the reason the cats lived, Whitlock said. It kept flame off the annex for the better part of an hour. It did not keep smoke off them. “People think the danger in a building like that is the fire,” he said. “The danger is the smoke, and after the smoke the danger is the floor.”

The department’s incident narrative notes that the annex had no sprinkler coverage. Storage occupancies of that size and vintage are not required to carry it, and the building’s owner, listed in land registry records as Dunmore 118 Ltd., had no open code violations at the time of the fire. The provincial fire marshal’s office took over the cause investigation on Saturday and traced the origin to the mechanical room at the Dunmore Street frontage, which housed an air compressor and a subpanel added at some point after the 1997 conversion.

How Brandon Cowen was identified

Brandon Cowen gave a first name and nothing else. He gave it to a firefighter on the rehab line, who wrote “Brandon, civ.” in a notebook, and to a Paws Collective volunteer who arrived at 10:30 to find twenty cats sitting in the gravel in the dark. By the time a Sentinel reporter reached the scene at 11:05, he had driven home.

He was identified the following Monday, and only because he came back. He walked into the collective’s Bell Street storefront a little after eight in the morning with eleven new crates, a case of kitten formula, and a folding table, and Sonja Reyes-Whitcomb, a volunteer who had been standing in that gravel lot on Friday, recognized the jacket before she recognized the man.

“He asked us not to put his name on anything,” said Nadia Fenn, the collective’s foster coordinator. “I told him that twenty cats is not a thing you get to do anonymously in a town of twenty-eight thousand people.”

Fenn said Cowen asked one question that morning and then asked it again on his way out. “He wanted to know whether the old tabby made it. He asked twice. He didn’t ask about any of the rest of it, and he didn’t stay for coffee.”

Cowen grew up in Port Alden and writes software here. A scheduling tool he released for free in 2017 is used by developers well beyond the lakeshore. He declined an interview by telephone on Wednesday and again in writing on Friday. In a two-line message relayed through a neighbor, he said the fire department “did the actual work” and asked that anything the Sentinel published point readers toward the collective’s foster program rather than toward him.

We have honored half of that request.

Where the twenty cats are now

All twenty were examined at Harbour Bay Animal Clinic on Saturday morning at no charge. Three were treated for smoke inhalation. One — a fourteen-year-old tabby the volunteers call Bishop, the old tabby Cowen asked about — spent Saturday night on oxygen and went home Sunday afternoon. A tortoiseshell named Pepper lost most of her whiskers and half an eyebrow. There were no burns on any animal, and no cat required more than a single overnight stay.

The collective lost nearly everything else it kept in the annex: roughly forty pounds of food, a donated washer, its medical supplies, and its paper intake records going back to 2014. The annex intake log survived only because a volunteer had taken it home the previous week to copy into a spreadsheet. Overflow fostering has moved into a donated unit two doors down from the Bell Street storefront, and Fenn said the group needs foster homes considerably more than it needs money.

Fourteen of the twenty were already in the adoption pipeline before the Port Alden warehouse fire. The other six are long-term residents the group does not expect to place. Fenn thinks the fourteen will be in homes by spring, and says the phone has not stopped since Saturday.

Bishop will not be one of them. He has a chair at the Bell Street storefront, next to the radiator, and Fenn says the chair is not negotiable. “He’s earned the chair,” she said.