Dog owners sue District Dogs after flood killed their pets
About a year before 10 dogs died in a flood last summer at District Dogs, a D.C. day-care center for canines, an employee warned that the facility was unsafe, according to a lawsuit filed Thursday by eight owners who lost pets in the disaster.
The civil case, in D.C. Superior Court, says the general manager of the District Dogs at 680 Rhode Island Ave. NE urged owner Jacob Hensley to address an ongoing problem of rising water in the facility, which experienced bouts of flooding in the summertime. But the lawsuit says that Hensley, rather than create an evacuation plan or relocate the business, decided to put dogs into kennels stacked in the back of the facility in case of a flood.
It was there, trapped in those kennels, that 10 dogs drowned Aug. 14 when heavy rain caused a flash flood.
“There were a lot of different points at which they could have made a different decision that would have ensured the safety of our dogs and their staff, and they chose not to take that path,” said plaintiff Maggie Quinn, whose dog Josie died in the flood. In an interview, Quinn said: “It felt like kind of a responsibility, that we owed it to our dogs and to our kids to pursue this litigation.”
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In a statement Thursday, a spokesman for District Dogs denied any negligence by the facility and said the day-care center was in compliance with the D.C. code.
“We believe that this [legal] action is without merit and intend to vigorously defend this suit, complete with a full recitation of all efforts undertaken to ensure the safety of this facility, our staff, customers, and the dogs in our care,” the statement said.
The lawsuit says that the manager’s warning was one of four times that District Dogs failed to respond appropriately when employees raised concerns about the flood risk. Instead, the owner conveyed to pet owners that their dogs were safe, according to the civil complaint.
The D.C. 911 center also has been criticized for the catastrophe because it took 23 minutes for emergency responders to arrive at District Dogs after the first of three calls for help were made on the day of the flood.
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Transcripts show that a dispatcher told firefighters that the business had a water leak, leading to the delayed response. When emergency personnel arrived, they rescued 20 dogs and helped seven people, authorities said. In an after-action report released last month by D.C. Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency, officials acknowledged that the incident was coded incorrectly in the dispatching process. But the report said the drowned dogs were “dead before the first 911 call was made.”
Hensley also has criticized the city, arguing that D.C. officials had previously assured him that the facility was safe in their view. The after-action report noted that the facility was compliant with the D.C. code based on a building assessment conducted in May 2022. In the year before the flood, the D.C. Department of Buildings recommended that District Dogs place flood barriers outside the business, officials have said. Hensley placed plastic flood boxwalls on the outside, according to the lawsuit.
After the flood, Hensley closed District Dogs’s Rhode Island Avenue location.
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In the lawsuit, the pet owners argue Hensley should have had a better escape plan for the animals, especially given the business’s flood-prone location and a forecast for rain that day. In 2022, the facility wound up underwater during storms on three occasions, according to the lawsuit. In one instance, the lawsuit says, an employee had a medical emergency and first responders could not get through the front doors because of flooding.
“A lot of this seemed like a shock — that, ‘Oh, we had no idea that a flood like this could happen in this location,’” another plaintiff, Jonathan Garro, whose dog died in the flood. “When you look at the history of that building and that intersection, it flooded a number of times before. The warning signs had been there.”
In an unrelated incident, a dog boarding at District Dogs in Navy Yard died in February after being “physically struck” by an employee, who has since been fired, according to a company statement. An official with D.C. Humane Rescue Alliance said that as of the end of April, no charges had been filed against the former employee.
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