Missing Girl Survives Blizzard By Hugging Stray Dog For 18 Hours

A 10-year-old girl who went missing after school survived an overnight blizzard in Russia’s far east by clinging to a stray dog for warmth, according to local media.

After Viktoria Zarubina went missing at 1 p.m. on January 13, dozens of people joined the search in Uglegorsk, on the island of Sakhalin. Tatyana, the girl’s mother, phoned the police when she did not come home.

A storm had deposited snow drifts up to 2 feet thick in the town, which is located approximately 170 miles northwest of the island’s administrative hub, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. As the weather deteriorated, with virtually no visibility, local officials called on volunteers to assist in the search.

“We must assist our people in Uglegorsk,” Evgenia Tuchkova, head of the National Center for Missing and Injured Children’s Sakhalin branch, told Komsolmolskaya Pravda, adding that the weather conditions made the search impossible. “You can image how bad things were.”

The search crew combed the area’s yards, houses, and alleyways, calling out the missing girl’s name and interviewing the inhabitants. After searching all night, the group received a key lead from a resident who remembered seeing a girl playing with a stray dog near a shelter in an apartment building’s yard.

More than 18 hours after she went missing, the youngster was discovered hiding beneath a low balcony, clutching to the animal while both sat on a mattress.

The area, which was only about 500 yards from her house, had not frozen over, and the balcony provided storm protection. The temperature was actually a reasonably moderate minus 5 degrees Celsius (23 degrees Fahrenheit), and she had dressed suitably for the frigid weather.

She snuggled next to the dog, afraid of the storm, as it began to become dark, according to Komsolmolskaya Pravda. The girl was rushed to the hospital but was released the following day.

“The fact that the girl survived in such conditions is truly a miracle,” Anatoly Ivanov, one of the search team volunteers, told the magazine.

“We looked all night, nothing was visible, our hands in mittens were so cold it was impossible to straighten our fingers,” he explained. “We began to suspect she might not be discovered alive the next morning. How are you going to live such a horror outside?”

“Fortunately, everything ended out to be well with the girl,” an Uglegorsk police official told local news source ASTV.