storms spawned at least three tornadoes<\/a> across the bottom half of Mississippi, injuring a dozen at the trailer park in the rural community of Bogue Chitto.<\/p>\nLemley had no idea where the kitten was, but he was determined to find it. After a few minutes, the meowing stopped, and Lemley feared the worst.<\/p>\n
Then, five minutes later, he heard it again.<\/p>\n
\u201cI said, \u2018Oh, he\u2019s still alive!\u2019\u201d Lemley told The Associated Press on Thursday.<\/p>\n
Lemley quickly dug under insulation from a flattened wall until his flashlight beam found the kitten \u2014 wet, scared and hiding between two wooden posts.<\/p>\n
Lemley captured the moment on video: \u201cOh my goodness, I found him!\u201d he says to the camera. \u201cAre you OK? Come here \u2013 it\u2019s OK. \u2026 We\u2019ll get you cleaned up, baby. Don\u2019t you worry.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lemley held the kitten in his arms for a few minutes before handing it off to the commander of the United Cajun Navy, a volunteer disaster-response group, who dried it off and took it to safety. Lemley marveled that it didn\u2019t appear to be injured.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve been in these situations so many times,\u201d said Lemley, who has been chasing storms since 2010. \u201cI don\u2019t try to get overly emotional. But it is very heartbreaking to see any type of animal or human go through something like that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lemley says there\u2019s already a lot of interest from people who want to adopt the kitten if its owners are not located. Some, he said, want to name it Tornado.<\/p>\n
It won\u2019t be coming home with him, though: Lemley is allergic to cats.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As storm chaser Ashton Lemley picked his way through a tornado-ravaged Mississippi trailer park, he heard the unmistakable…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":26024,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[8205,15925,2488,50,8,4589,6476,3186,9,8676,1371,7,54],"class_list":{"0":"post-26023","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-top-stories","8":"tag-animals","9":"tag-cats","10":"tag-domestic-news","11":"tag-general-news","12":"tag-headlines","13":"tag-mississippi","14":"tag-ms-state-wire","15":"tag-natural-disasters","16":"tag-news","17":"tag-oddities","18":"tag-science","19":"tag-top-stories","20":"tag-u-s-news"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@news\/116537280606516842","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26023","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26023"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26023\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26024"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26023"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26023"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26023"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}