Alabama Woman Says One Strange Behavior from Her Dog Saved Her Family from a Devastating Lightning Storm Fire (Exclusive)
Rhiannon Bamberg says her dog, Kali, nudged her toward the garage minutes before she discovered it engulfed in flames
Rhiannon Bamberg’s dog, Kali, has never loved a thunderstorm. So when a storm rolled through in the early morning hours of that Friday, Aug. 21, she didn’t find it unusual when her pup climbed onto her. But what happened next, and over the next hour, was anything but ordinary.
As she and Kali listened to the thunder, Bamberg heard a sudden popping and cracking sound, and Kali’s whole demeanor changed.
“She jolts her head up, and she starts running out of the bedroom door. And that’s not like her in a thunderstorm,” Bamberg tells PEOPLE in an exclusive interview. She followed the dog into the hallway, where she heard what sounded like a tornado hitting the house.
Bamberg was on her way to wake her boyfriend, Rex, when she noticed something strange: instead of heading for the front or back door as she normally would, Kali kept nudging toward the garage. “When she was nudging and looking at the garage door, I went to open it,” Bamberg recalls. “And when I opened the door, I saw the garage full of smoke, full of flames.”
She slammed the door shut, woke Rex and got herself and Kali into their fenced-in backyard while Rex ran to move the cars. He managed to reverse her car out of the driveway, but the flames tore the garage door down and set the vehicle on fire; he then pulled his truck clear as best he could.
