Dec 26, 2007 11:29 pm US/Eastern
Pittsburgh Zoo Has Plan In Place If Animal Escapes
PITTSBURGH (KDKA) ―
Investigators in San Francisco are trying to figure out how a Siberian tiger escaped its cage, killing a 17-year-old boy from San Jose and injuring two others.
The Pittsburgh Zoo and PPG Aquarium has a plan in place if any dangerous animals were to escape. They and the zoo in San Francisco have moats in their tiger exhibits.
At the Pittsburgh Zoo, they also have daily inspections and government inspections twice a year.
Some of the exhibit's safety precautions are obvious. The moat at the tiger exhibit is deep. The tigers can trek down for a swim but can't climb up the other side.
"It's a straight up and down wall that seems impossible for any tiger or anything to scale," Connie George, a zoo official, said.
Something you may not notice are the wires on top of a fence in the back.
"If an animal should try to climb the fence - there would be a hot wire - and they wouldn't be able to do so," George said.
But if an animal were to escape, the zoo has a plan and employees practice it with an annual emergency drill.
"Everybody has a position that they need to be in and there's team of people that does a specific thing with the animal - there's team of people that make sure that everyone gets into the, all the visitors get into an enclosed area," she explained.
The practice paid off four years ago when a gorilla used some bamboo that fell over in the wind as a ladder to climb a wall and walk into an area where people were eating.
"Went into the food court and drank everybody's sodas and ate everybody's muffins," George recalled.
People were evacuated and the gorilla was tranquilized.
In 1987, Alphie the monkey escaped from the zoo and wasn't caught until six months later, 60 miles away in Bridgeport, Ohio.
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